Phenomenology as Apologetics

Abstract

Some classics of pre-war British theology appeared in Nisbet's Library of Constructive Theology. The aim of writers in that series was, in the words of editors W. R. Matthews and H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘to lay stress on the value and validity of religious experience and to develop their theology on the basis of the religious consciousness’. Such an empirical approach ensures for the theological product a high content of the kind of material fundamental to modern Phenomenology of Religion; that is, the description and interpretation of experiences, behaviour, and other phenomena of life taken by the religious believer as manifestations of divine reality and activity. A re-reading from a phenomenological point of view, then, can discover new significance in those writings which, though less than a generation old, are all too easily felt to be obsolescent in the light of more recent theological fashions.