Religion, Philosophy of
Religion, Philosophy Of
the science of religion; the application of philosophical principles to the discussion of its general character, origin, and claims. It presents,
1, religion in general;
2, revealed religion;
3, the Christian religion;
4, the Christian Church.
This subject is discussed by Apelt (1860), Beneke (1840), Chateaubriand, Deuzinger (1857), Fichte, Hegel ( Werke, vol. xi), Kant (Religion innerhalb, with Kirchmann’s notes), Krug (1819), Morrel (Philosophy of Religion; see the Methodist Quarterly Review, July, Oct., 1850), Pascal (Pensees), Otto Pfleiderer (1869), Heinrich Ritter (1858, 1859), Arnold Ruge (1869), Schleiermacher (Monologen), F. X. Schmid (1857), and Spinoza. See Fleming and Krauth, Vocabulary of Philosophy, p. 854.
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Religion, Philosophy of
The methodic or systematic investigation of the elements of religious consciousness, the theories it has evolved and their development and historic relationships in the cultural complex. It takes account of religious practices only as illustrations of the vitality of beliefs and the inseparableness of the psychological from thought reality in faith. It is distinct from theology in that it recognizes the priority of reason over faith and the acceptance of creed, subjecting the latter to a logical analysis. As such, the history of the Philosophy of Religion is coextensive with the free enquiry into religious reality, particularly the conceptions of God, soul, immortality, sin, salvaition, the sacred (Rudolf Otto), etc., and may be said to have its roots in any society above the pre-logical, mythological, or custom-controlled level, first observed in Egypt, China, India, and Greece. Its scientific treatment is a subsidiary philosophic discipline dates from about Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vernunft and Hegel’s Philosophie der Religion, while in the history of thought based on Indian and Greek speculation, sporadic sallies were made by all great philosophers, especially those professing an idealism, and by most theologians.
With reference to the approach to the central reality of religion, God, and man’s relation to it, types of the Philosophy of Religion may be distinguished, leaving out of account negative (atheism), skeptical and cynical (Xenophanes, Socrates, Voltaire), and agnostic views, although insertions by them are not to be separated from the history of religious consciousness. Fundamentalism, mainly a theological and often a Church phenomenon of a revivalist nature, philosophizes on the basis of unquestioning faith, seeking to buttress it by logical argument, usually taking the form of proofs of the existence of God (see God). Here belong all historic religions, Christianity in its two principal forms, Catholicism with its Scholastic philosophy and Protestantism with its greatly diversified philosophies, the numerous religions of Hinduism, such as Brahmanism, Shivaism and Vishnuism, the religion of Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Mysticism, tolerated by Church and philosophy, is less concerned with proof than with description and personal experience, revealing much of the psychological factors involved in belief and speculation. Indian philosophy is saturated with mysticism since its inception, Sufism is the outstanding form of Arab mysticism, while the greatest mystics in the West are Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas a Kempis, and Jacob Bohme. Metaphysics incorporates religious concepts as thought necessities. Few philosophers have been able to avoid the concept of God in their ontology, or any reference to the relation of God to man in their ethics. So, e.g., Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and especially Hegel who made the investigation of the process of the Absolute the essence of the Philosophy of Religion.
With respect to the concept of God, a specific philosophy of religion may be a theism with its many forms of henotheism, monotheism, etc., a deism, pantheism, anthropomorphism, animism, panpsychism (all of which see), or the like, or it rmy fall into the general philosophic classification of a transcendentilism, immanentalism, absolutism, etc. By the term modernism is meant the tendency, subtended by the recent interest of science in religion (Sirs J. H. Jeans and A. S. Eddington, A. Carrell et al.) to interpret religious experience in close contact with physical and social reality, thus transforming the age-old personalism into a thoroughgoing humanism, thereby accomplishing an even greater attachment to social thinking and practical ethics and a trend away from metaphvsical speculation toward a psychologizing in the Philosophy of Religion.
Practically all philosophers of religion (to name in addition to thoce above only Schleiermacher, Lotze, Pfleiderer, Hoffding, Siebeck, Galloway, Ladd, Wundt, Josiah Royce, W. E. Hocking, Barth, and Hauer) are carried by an ethical idealism, being interested in the good life as the right relation between God and man, conforming by and large to the ethical citegories of determinism, indeterminism, mechanism, rationalism, etc. Buddhists, though not believing in God, profess an ethics religiously motivated and supported philosophically.
The scientific study of primitive leligions, with such well known names as E. B. Tylor, F. B. Jevons, W. H. R. Rivers, J. G. Frazer, R. H. Codrington, Spencer and Gillen, E. Westermarck, E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl; the numerous outlines of the development of religion since Hume’s Natural History of Religion and E. Caird’s Evolution of Religion; the prolific literature dealing with individual religions of a higher type, the science of comparative religion with such namea as that of L. H. Jordan, the many excellent treitises on the psychology of religion including Wm. James’ Varieties of Religious Experience; the sacred literature of all peoples in various editions together with a voluminous theological exegesis, Church history and, finally, the history of dogma, especially the monumental work of von Harnack, — all are contributing illustrative material to the Philosophy of Religion which became stimulated to scientific efforts through the positivism of Spencer, Huxley, Lewes, Tyndall, and others, and is still largely oriented by the progress in science, as may be seen, e.g., by the work of Emile Boutroux, S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity), and A. N. Whitehead.
See, apart from the works of the authors named, George Trumbull Ladd, The Philosophy of Religion; Edwin A. Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, Edgar S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion. — K.F.L.