Dogma and Doubt in a Pluralist Culture
What follows is in substance a series of lectures which I gave in Glasgow University as Alexander Robertson Lecturer for the year 1988. I am very grateful to Professor George Newlands and his colleagues in the Divinity Faculty both for the honor they did me by extending the invitation, and for the great kindness they showed my wife and me during our stay in Glasgow. I am also grateful to the students who attended the lectures and stimulated my thinking by their vigorous participation in discussion in smaller groups.
I can make no claim either to originality or to scholarship. I am a pastor and preacher, trying to make available to my fellow pastors and others such thinking as I have gleaned in my very unsystematic reading bearing on the topic I am trying to address. A scholarly work would contain references to all the relevant literature and evidence that the writer had taken account of all the various arguments. To have dignified my text with a proper apparatus of footnotes would have been to pretend to a kind of scholarship which I do not possess. It is better, in this foreword, simply to acknowledge some very massive debts to writers from whom I have borrowed without always acknowledging the fact. Throughout the work, and especially in the first five chapters, I have relied heavily on the work of Michael Polanyi, especially his Personal Knowledge (1958). At many points I have been indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre, especially his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). In Chapter 9 I have drawn heavily on Hendrikus Berkhof's Christ, the Meaning of History (1966). And in Chapter 16 I have drawn ideas from Walter Wink's Naming the Powers (1984) and Unmasking the Powers (1986).
Like all people who have used the English language I have until recently been accustomed to using the masculine pronoun inclusively to refer to both halves of the human family. That this is, for valid reasons, no longer acceptable to many readers poses a problem for the writer. To use both pronouns ("he or she") at every point can make sentences intolerably convoluted. I have therefore used both "he" and "she" inclusively and-I hope-impartially. I hope that this will not expose me to any serious charge of moral delinquency.
I am very grateful to Dr. Dan Beeby and Dr. Harold Turner of the Selly Oak Colleges, who were kind enough to read my first draft and to help me with comment. They bear no responsibility for the defects of the final product.