Post by rick on Jan 18, 2007 15:20:36 GMT -5
Or when in our history did the widely-believed notion of absolute Truth begin to fade in the minds of Americans and Christians?
Os Guinness wrote a book called Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What To Do About It
He suggests that pragmatism influenced and undermined the Christian mind while being very similar to faith. Pragmatism is "synonymous with the American way of doing things" i.e. "is self-evident to most Americans."
He writes:
He continues:
Os Guinness wrote a book called Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What To Do About It
He suggests that pragmatism influenced and undermined the Christian mind while being very similar to faith. Pragmatism is "synonymous with the American way of doing things" i.e. "is self-evident to most Americans."
He writes:
William James, the Harvard philosopher and psychologist of religion, founded the formal philosophy of pragmatism. Working at the end of the nineteenth century, he held that religious beliefs were only true because of their consequences for human behavior, not because of their philosophical claims. Truth, in other words, was not absolute. It was an attribute that beliefs acquired as they were worked out in practice.
He continues:
Jame's immediate influence was not on evangelicalism but on Protestant liberalism - through the practical relativism that was the hallmark of his thinking. But evangelicals were not immune to pragmatism. The truth is that evangelicals were pragmatists long before James. They were pragmatists well before pragmatism was a self-conscious philosophy.