BEYOND THEOLOGY: The Autobiography of Edward Scribner Ames

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The author, for many years teacher of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and for forty years pastor of the University Church of the Disciples of Christ, as well as dean of the Disciples Divinity House, has given us the story of his life, which is largely the engrossing account of his life's search for the truth of religion, which he sees enlarged by the scientific and philosophic advances of his day. Dr. Ames had a reverence for all truth as God's truth, and he was impatient toward creeds, dogma, and theology. He was a true liberal of the school that flourished the first part of the twentieth century, though it was thrown off its stride a bit, and was caught unaware by the first World War. His autobiographical writing was largely finished by 1940, at which time he thought of man's great task as the bringing to fuller realization the kingdom of heaven within man,--and the two great principles essential to its fulfillment as love and wisdom. These qualities, he believed, are self-evidencing. They are not speculative or theological, though, he says, love is of God, and wisdom is essential to the development of love. One wonders whether he found his position ""beyond theology"" so comfortable during and after the second World War, with the wide return to the sort of orthodox theology he had worked away from. Nevertheless, the book makes fascinating reading to anyone who may today wonder what the world was like which could produce a man so sane and untroubled, but humanly, if naively, wise as Dr. Ames.

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Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago Press

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Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1959

Categories: NONFICTION