Book Review: Notebooks by Schubert M. Ogden

[1] Throughout his long and productive career Schubert M. Ogden, who died in 2019 at the age of 91, distinguished himself as one of American Protestantism’s finest theologians.  This book is his final publication.  It consists of a relatively small selection of entries from his personal notebooks that were written over decades, in which he reflects on questions of both a theological and a philosophical nature.  The bulk of these notebooks is housed in the archives of Drew University and has been made easily accessible online to interested readers at: https://uknow.drew.edu/confluence/display/ogden/Ogden+Notebooks+Home

[2] The present publication in book form of some of these notebook entries is divided into three parts: 1) philosophical analyses, 2) transcendental metaphysics, and 3) God.  Readers who are familiar with Ogden’s published books and articles will not be surprised by the space given to philosophical questions and specifically to metaphysics.  Unlike most Protestant theologians, Ogden argues that a responsible theology must of necessity be philosophical, asking about the truth of Christian faith and not merely about its meaning.  To rephrase this point in terms of a distinction often made by theologians, in Ogden’s view theology has to be apologetic as well as dogmatic.  Only in this way can theology critically validate the claim made by Christian witness that the gospel of Jesus re-presents (presents anew) the gift and demand of God’s love that are originally presented to each and every human being simply as such.

[3] Ogden’s conviction that a fully critical theology must seek to validate the claim to truth made by Christian witness solely by appeal to reason and common human experience sets his model of theology apart from virtually all other current proposals for how the theological task is to be understood and implemented.

[4] Ogden’s view of theology’s task also presupposes a quite different assessment of the philosophical possibilities available to us than that which is assumed by most theologians and philosophers since Kant (with the exception of Hegel).  Standing in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, Ogden affirms both the possibility and the necessity of metaphysics.  Accordingly, he develops a “neo-classical” metaphysics that understands reality at the most basic or fundamental level in terms of “process” or “becoming.”  This is the new element in neo-classical metaphysics by contrast with classical metaphysics, which sought to understand reality in terms of “substance” or “being.”  Unlike Whitehead and Hartshorne, however, Ogden insists that a defensible neo-classical metaphysics must be austerely  “transcendental” rather than “categorial.”  Instead of deriving metaphysical categories by generalizing from some particular region of experience and then applying these categories analogically to the whole of reality, metaphysical claims are strictly transcendental in the precise sense that, if properly formulated, they articulate the necessary presuppositions of the condition of the possibility of anything whatsoever, whether actual or possible.  Their truth is demonstrated by the self-contradiction that results from their denial. Thus, they are ineluctably presupposed by all truly conceivable thought and activity.

[5] One of Schleiermacher’s students said of his teacher that he taught theology the way Socrates would have taught it had he been a Christian!  Readers of Ogden’s published notebooks will realize that this is also an apt characterization of Ogden.  Like Socrates, Odgen insists upon conceptual clarity in the definition of terms and logical rigor in the development of arguments.  These notebook entries give the reader an opportunity to witness a truly first-rate mind at work tackling some of the most difficult questions of theology and philosophy in a manner reminiscent of Anselm and Thomas Aquinas.  Anyone who believes that theology’s claim to express the ultimate truth of human existence is rationally redeemable will welcome this volume.  I can only hope that even more entries from Ogden’s notebooks will be published in a second volume.