Word: garnetts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Australian-born Congregationalist A. Campbell Garnett, philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin and past president of the American Philosophical Association, thinks that most theologians have taken to playing a kind of word game of their own that has no relevance to the needs of ordinary men. For example, Paul Tillich, America's most eminent theologian, talks of God as "Being Itself" or "Ultimate Reality"-a hard kind of God to worship, much less to love...
Philosopher Garnett blames the ancient Greeks for a large part of the trouble. The church fathers leaned heavily on Greek metaphysics and produced a natural theology that attempted to prove logically the existence of God and to define his nature. For Protestants at least, Garnett thinks, science has swept away such metaphysics; instead, they refer to God in the Biblical language of faith. But they recognize at the same time "that these Biblical concepts and statements cannot be taken literally as if they were pure history and science. They are symbols and their meaning lies deeper." The result is that...