Abstract

In The Critical Way in Religion, Duncan Howlett proposes a new approach to the age-old question of religious belief. According to the author, authority and tradition cannot provide adequate answers for religion, nor can modern liberalism. These approaches fail to come to terms with the problems of human error and the need for innovation. Organized religion has not subjected its claim to know eternal truth to the severe testing accepted in all other disciplines and has been highly resistant to the introduction of new practices and patterns of thought. The Critical Way in Religion identifies a religious tradition older than Christianity and at least as old as Judaism that has taken human fallibility and human resourcefulness fully into account. The author traces the evolution of this tradition from its beginning in Greece in the sixth century B.C. and shows how its characteristic principles have developed. Today, although worldwide in scope but by no means universally accepted, the critical approach to religion is found inside as well as outside organized religion, among churchgoers and among the supposedly nonreligious as well. Howlett maintains that the critical tradition in religion developed independent of the Judeo-Christian tradition but that the two are closely related. The critical tradition has its heroes, its martyrs, and a growing body of thought, but as yet no name and no church fully committed to it. Although the modern worldwide university system is the critical spirit institutionalized, it is primarily nonreligious. This book calls for the institutionalizing of the critical spirit in religion and concludes with a set of clear and positive, yet critical, religious principles. - Back cover.