Humanity and deity

Wilbur Marshall Urban offers a fresh defense of the classical understanding of how God and humankind relate. He argues against two rival positions: humanism, which would make religion nothing but human experience, and the theology of crisis, which would make it nothing but the divine. For Urban, the ideas of humanity and God collapse into incoherence when pulled apart.

He contends that religion engages reason as well as faith and feeling. To make that case, he revisits the connection between dogmatic and rational theology and reworks the rational side. The core of the book is a review of the traditional arguments for God's existence, along with an axiological reading of the whole theistic argument, which treats the case for God as a matter of values.

Along the way, Urban examines language, myth, symbolism, logic, intuition, and creed. He then turns to the question of how religious knowledge is possible, considers how religion and science relate in contemporary thought, and closes by asking what religion has to do with the humanities.