ONE MAN'S FAITH
Robertson, Priscilla
One Man's Faith The Faith of A Heretic, by Wal-ter Kaufmann. Doubleday. 432 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson It no longer requires physical courage to be a religious non-conformist,...
...In terms like these it becomes hard to disentangle oneself from the fellowship of believers...
...Because there is no English word to denote his first quality, a mixture of humility and ambition, he coins the somewhat unfortunate expression, "humbition...
...This Princeton philosopher has now written a book by the same title in which he admirably demonstrates the qualities mentioned above...
...Between the beginning of one of their sentences and its end, a word may undergo slippage without any warning...
...The book is a demonstration of Kaufmann's high spirits as well as his learning and cogency...
...He points to Sigmund Freud as a modern example of this constellation of virtues...
...What does it make you when you do choose...
...The rest of the list embraces love, courage, and honesty, which he says is rarer than courage...
...But what do the churchmen themselves believe...
...But anything can be made symbolic-Aphrodite, Satan, what you will...
...Tillich, Schweitzer, and other Protestant thinkers avowedly regard the Christian stories symbolically...
...The theologians themselves are not quite sure...
...He argues a powerfully interesting case (although I believe an exaggerated one) for the superiority of the Old Testament over the New...
...How do you choose...
...Kaufmann finds no concern for social ethics in the New Testament, and he believes that the personal morality set forth there is almost completely self-serving...
...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson It no longer requires physical courage to be a religious non-conformist, but it does require persistence, honesty, mental clarity, and the conviction that what is believed matters...
...He wants, he says, to make the reader feel his own faith is at stake, and whether that reader puts his faith in philosophy or popular religion, he will feel the sting of Kaufmann's wit...
...he regards Jesus' and Paul's counsels as a distinct falling off from the prophets who demanded that justice should roll down like water...
...Indeed they sometimes admit that "mercy" and "justice" for God are to be understood differently from what we mean by the same qualities applied to people...
...If atheism is no longer widely regarded as wicked, it is still considered painfully queer, especially now that the churches have become so all-embracing that they will admit almost anybody who is willing to use the word "God" for whatever he happens to believe in...
...Its motto is, "Judge that you may be judged...
...Heretics will rejoice, and for others the book may at least raise the level of debate...
...Kaufmann even quotes Father John Walsh, S.J., as saying that an unconscious longing for salvation is equivalent to real membership in the Catholic Church, and Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, to the effect that the only "imaginable" form of atheism is indifference to the meaning of existence...
...Thus the Beatitudes announce a "reward in Heaven," while Paul declared that if he gave all his goods to feed the poor and had not charity it profited him nothing...
...A few years ago Harper's, in its series on religion today, picked Walter Kaufmann to delineate "The Faith of a Heretic...
...Having ringingly preferred the social conscience of the prophets of Israel, Kaufmann rather surprisingly concludes his book with a list of personal virtues...
...Kaufmann's own favorite religious figure is Moses who, he says, relused any ascriptions of divinity and whose non-retributive morality was one of the few sudden great visions of history...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
