Ends and Means in Religious Education 33
nature requires perennial self-criticism and re-appraisal.
Previously accepted values and objectives are re-evaluated,
criticized and even rejected; vitality of life is expressed in
negative as well as positive judgments. In fact, the religious
history of the race is in part a record of such re-evaluation.
It is fundamental for the understanding of succeeding gen-
erations that they in part relive the growth and develop-
ment of the past, continuing the process of evaluation. Apart
from such criticism, there can be only incomplete and trun-
cated appropriation of the insights of the past in either per-
sonal or group experience.
The world’s great religions are specific and concrete in
the way in which they seek to close the gap between thought
and emotion. Their teachings are more appropriately de-
scribed by Professor Tillich’s phrase, “ultimate concern,” than
Dewey’s “religious attitude”; the former directs attention to
man’s search for ultimate reality which the latter disregards.
Tillich’s Yale Terry Lectures, The Courage To Be, make clear
that authentic faith must give a creative basis to morality as
well as assure mature self-acceptance.12 Tilfich emphasizes
the Judeo-Christian rejection of Stoicism. Historically, theism
has found unity of life in God’s providence and the divine
will. Monotheism is not simply an abstract doctrine, but the
affirmation of a single moral purpose which gives meaning to
all of life and existence. Its rejection of idolatry, the integra-
tion of the self around a plurality of goods, is in effect a rec-
ognition that a diversity of absolute goods is self-defeating.
This is true not simply at the primitive level, but throughout
all man’s higher spiritual life. Polytheism is ultimately de-
structive because it directs man away from his ultimate loyal-
ty to the one God.
Theism emphasizes as well that man is a finite creature.
Although he has a unique place in the order of creation, he