Natural Religion and Christian Theology

This second volume of the 1951-2 Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion and Christian Theology completes Canon Raven's version of a modern Religio Medici. If the Cartesian dualism of body and mind is challenged successfully by an integrative or holistic philosophy, the theological statements are also required, to express the Christian's interpretation of his experience. In this second set of lectures Canon Raven examines critically and constructively the scope and character of this restatement and interpretation. He claims that any adequate interpretation must be stated in fully personal categories; that the confession of Jesus as the image of the invisible can still be accepted, provided it be recognised that this involves a more radical restatement of the nature of God and of the quality of human solidarity than has been accepted by tradition; and that on these conditions it is still possible for man to 'live eternally'.