Word: dewart
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...evoking constructive responses. Even a stern critic like Dean John Dillenberger of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union is prepared to admit that the movement also "cleared away some simple-minded notions of what the life of God means." Others find it a bit more significant. Lay Theologian Leslie Dewart, at the University of Toronto, thinks that any fur ther theology must now be done from "a new perspective, and a realization that the pre-certitudes are gone...
Recollecting the time when the Advocate's style was "like that of a Harvard English professor," the member went on to suggest that Randolph Rheyns '68 and Mack Dewart '70 wrote their articles under the influence of drugs...
...More Superjudge. Dewart thinks that atheists such as Freud have a point in viewing religion as something that in the past has hindered rather than helped man's self-development. The church, he says, should concede that many of its teachings about God-the superjudge, for example, who mechanistically rewards good and punishes evil in the afterlife-are immature and unthinkable to the modern mind. One key concept that Dewart regards as disposable is the Christian conviction, derived from Hellenic philosophy, that God is to be understood in terms of being...
Medieval scholastics, following the sages of ancient Greece, defined God as "subsisting Being Itself"-a Supreme Creator whose essence is identical with his existence. Whatever value the formula once had, says Dewart, it no longer accords with contemporary philosophical conceptions of being, which limit the word to knowable, created things and to men. Moreover, Christian belief is not an intellectual acquiescence in the idea of God as Supreme Being, but involves "a leap of faith"-an act of total self-commitment to God as a transcendent reality who is at once absent and present to man. In the future, Dewart...
Nameless Presence. In Dewart's brief sketch of a theology for the future, the church might no longer talk of God as a Trinity, since the terminology-three persons in one nature-is also applicable only to finite beings. Nor will God be considered omnipotent. Platonic thinking led the scholastics to envision a God who stood over and against nature. The idea of God as a transcendental presence implies to Dewart that God is to be envisioned as a reality found in and through nature, as the shaping force of history. And in so far as the word...