Abstract

The Lilly Endowment Research Program in Christianity and Politics is an enviable form of energetic subsidy which implements an American concern for intellectual integrity much more realistically than the lipservice which older and more complacent nations commonly profess. It believes that Christian culture should be brought to bear in detail upon the actual problems of politics and social order and it devotes an annual series of public lectures to this high-minded aim. The published series is inaugurated in this exploratory essay into the possible nature of Christian philosophy itself by a distinguished Harvard professor, the text being developed from his Walter Freeman Whitman Lectures and Lilly Foundation Lectures of 1958. Holding that our anxious century has lost confidence in the self-sufficiency of human reason to establish an evident and closed order in reality, he believes that men are now ready to contemplate the reality of a chastened reason open to the influence of religious ideals. And he claims that the very reception of the term, ‘Christian philosophy’ only recently into common usage is ‘the expression of a noteworthy gap in our intellectual history’.