Borden Parker Bowne - Philosophy and Theology

Philosophy and Theology

Bowne’s most lasting contributions came in the philosophy of religion. His religious background is important in this regard. Bowne was a popular guest preacher throughout his career and a volume of his sermons was published posthumously under the title The Essence of Religion (1910). His constant stream of contributions to popular religious magazines and newspapers made him one of the foremost theological opinion leaders of his time. These voluminous popular writings were applications of his technical philosophical positions to the social and religious issues of the day. These writings bespeak an unusual mixture of progressive ideas, the guiding spirit of which is a devotion to clarity of thought and practicality of viewpoint. It will be worthwhile to make note of two theological and biographical points before moving to a summary of Bowne’s formal philosophy.

Bowne was able to negotiate a kind of theistic naturalism that enabled him to avoid much of the controversy over evolutionary theory during his career. His basic position was that there was no naturalistic or theological basis for treating nature, its changes, developments, and laws, as something over against God. The idea that a scientific description of nature could contradict the basic principles of theism betrayed a misunderstanding of both nature and theism. Thus, the reductive evolutionist misunderstands nature by assuming that the result of a process ought to be understood through its beginnings or origins, when in fact it is only from the practical survey of the results that the origins can be empirically approached or deduced. This same limiting principle applies to all human understanding and knowledge regardless of whether the question before us is natural, cultural or historical. In addition, whatever principles and trends may have prevailed regarding an origin, they are undeveloped in their original state and therefore not to be valued except as seen through a later accomplishment, i.e., their having produced a valuable result. There might be any number of trends and happenings in natural or human history which were dead-ends and no one is scandalized by their lack of issue, so why should any theist be scandalized where the issue of natural or historical processes is so immensely and obviously valuable as in the case of evolution? On the other side, the defenders of “special creation” err in assuming that God is something supernatural, something wholly apart from nature. Bowne points out that unless God is conceived as working immanently within each moment of experience, be it natural or human, the sustaining continuity of natural or human experience is wholly without an explanation. Thus, every event is a special creation in the sense that the complete explanation for its existence cannot be given by science, history, theology, or any other device of human understanding. Scientific explanations are incomplete, just as theological explanations are incomplete. One result of this view is that there is no reason to defend the idea of miracles in the traditional sense of the word, since a serviceable conception of the immanent activity of God in nature renders such traditional tales more suitable for children than persons of mature faith, according to Bowne. This latter view, in which Bowne denies the traditional view of miracles and argues against the blood atonement, and by implication the resurrection, led him into troubles with the conservative constituency of his church, and also led William James to remark to Bowne in a letter that he (James) was “a better Methodist than you, in spite of your efforts to persuade me to the contrary. If the ass and the blatherskite succeed in their efforts to weed you out of the body, I hope they will have the wisdom to get me voted in to fill the vacuum.” (December 29, 1903). Bowne’s standard answer to such charges was to remind his accusers that there was a difference between matters of knowledge in which human methods could expect some success, however limited, and in matters of faith which take up where investigation will avail nothing.