Summer 1967

Page 16

Leslie Dewart has sensed the need of integrating Christian theism with the experience of contemporary man. He has also had the ambition and the on courage to make a bold move to satisfy this need in his book, The Future of Belief (Herder and Herder). His project has included an extensive analysis of the nature of faith. Faith A critique should be defined as "the ex路 of Dewart's answer istential response of the self to certain problems to the openness of the transon the nature cendence disclosed by con路 of faith scious experience. It is our decision to respect, to let be, the contingency of our being, and therefore to admit into our calculations a reality beyond the totality of being" (p. 64). It is both "our openness + to the openness of transcendence . . . and the return or CHRISTOPHER self-projection of ourselves KIESLING, O.P. toward the ultimate transcendence" (pp. 64-65). + "Christian belief is a religious experience . . . dif路 ferent from no other experience-it is a conscious awareness of the same epistemological order as ordinary 'knowledge.' Its difference ... has to do with that of which it is an experience, namely, a transcendent reality first adumbrated negatively in the empirical apprehension of the contingency of our own he路

::bewarl

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