William J. Abraham

If Albert Knudson's commitment to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, owes anything to self-conscious appropriation of the Wesleyan heritage then the debt was entirely accidental. For one thing, Knudson's immediate successors, represented most capably by Miley, had reduced Wesley's four-fold appeal to a two-fold appeal to Scripture and reason.1 Miley was forthright in his rejection of creeds, confessions, and historical theology as warrants in theology. Valuable as these were, they possessed no authoritative quality. Indeed, in the hands of Rome, the appeal to tradition had become a source of serious error and had led not only to a sense of the incompleteness of Scripture, but also to a denial of the Scriptures to the people. Equally, Miley was opposed to experience as a source of Christian theology. Thus, he allowed an element of truth in mysticism but insisted that it provided no new revelation and that it drove out prudence and wisdom. Moreover, he acknowledged the reality of the Christian experience of sin and fully accepted that there was a specific form of Christian consciousness, but he argued that these necessarily presupposed a prior commitment to Christian doctrine and therefore could not function as a true source of Christian theology. Hence, Knudson could not have gained his analysis of the sources from Miley. To have done this, Knudson would have had to create a vast overdraft on Miley's account, for Miley had only two items in his theological bank and Knudson increased these to four.

Knudson's lack of debt has a much deeper reason than this, however. Expressing it sharply, Knudson's attitude to his predecessors in the Wesleyan tradition is little short of contemptuous.2 As Knudson read the history of Methodist theology up to his own time, the work was at best competent. Wesley and his preachers do not really count for, in their day "comparatively little was done in the way of systematic theological study."3 And as for the great giants of the nineteenth century, that is to say Watson and Pope in England, and Raymond and Miley in America, they did "creditable work in systematizing Methodist doctrine."4 However they left much to be desired: ". . . they were not creative thinkers, they were guided by no new organizing principle, they gave no new direction to theological thought."5 It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Knudson saw the work of his own generation as the inauguration of a whole new era in Methodist theology.

The initial question that this poses is the consistency of this claim with Knudson's commitment to the four elements of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Is Knudson actually recovering a vital element in the original Wesley tradition which had been lost in the nineteenth century? Of course, one can dismiss this by saying that the Wesleyan quadrilateral is a modern invention skillfully developed by twentieth century Methodist theologians to foster their own theological agenda. Indeed, I predict that, if it has not already happened, those opposed to the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral may in the light of this paper seek to argue that the quadrilateral is really an invention of Methodist apostates like Knudson rather than an essential feature of the Wesleyan legacy.6

That aside, what we have to explain is how Knudson, on the one hand, speaks so favorably of the ingredients in the Wesleyan quadrilateral and, on the other, self-consciously seeks to initiate a whole new era of Methodist theology. Is there here a fascinating and genuine reworking of the tradition in that one aspect of the heritage is being used to articulate a brilliant new synthesis in systematic theology? Or is there here merely a superficial commitment to a crucial element in the classical Wesleyan legacy patched on inadvertently to a radical deconstruction of Wesleyan theology? Sensitive observers will surely agree that it is these options which are not only the most entertaining, but by far the most important in any debate about the renewal of the Wesleyan tradition in our day.

That Knudson was committed to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience is beyond doubt. A whole chapter on his Doctrine of God makes this quite explicit.7 Moreover, Knudson was committed to the kind of grading or ranking of these four sources that one finds in Wesley. Thus Scripture stands apart from the other three. Scripture has a primacy and priority not possessed by tradition, reason, and experience. Not only is it generally admitted that the Bible should be the chief source and norm of Christian theology, "it is the Bible that in a special and pre-eminent sense is the source and norm of Christian belief."8 The reason Knudson offers for this ranking echoes the kind of reason offered by Wesley. Fundamentally, the Bible has priority because, "in it we have the earliest and most trustworthy record of that unique revelation of God which was mediated to the world through Jewish and early Christian history and which constitutes the foundation of the Christian faith."9 So the Bible is uniquely inspired, it is the one original and authentic record of God's special revelation of Himself, it is properly spoken of as the Word of God. These considerations, together with its historical primacy in furnishing data for the nature of primitive Christianity, constitute "adequate ground for ascribing to the Bible a position of transcendent significance. To it, therefore, as to no other source theology will go back for its material and for its validation."10

When Knudson fills out his account of authority by exploring the limits of the canon and how it is to be used then, again, he writes like a good Wesleyan. Thus, he repudiates any Marcionite move to reject the Old Testament and he quite rightly insists that the Christ of faith is essential to a normative reading of the New Testament documents. Moreover, he suggests that we should use the Bible inclusively rather than exclusively in our theology. Hence, he argues that the tradition of the church, the insights of reason, and the content of Christian experience should have a genuine but subordinate role in the articulation and defense of Christian theology. His summary conclusion is worth quoting in full:

We have, then, as definitive of the unique or special field of theology, one main source, the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, and three additional sources which may be described as supplementary or regulative; namely, the church the natural reason as expressed in the theistic philosophies, and Christian experience.11

Initially, then, Knudson stands firmly within the Wesleyan tradition on the issue of authority. Indeed, his position on the issue of authority is much closer to Wesley than that of Miley. Ironically, Knudson never saw thus. Nowhere does he point out that he is in fact very close to Wesley in his inclusivist use of Scripture. In fact, I think he would have been quite surprised, for Knudson saw the significance of Wesley entirely differently. Wesley's great contribution, as Knudson saw it, did not lie in the quadrilateral; it lay in Wesley's emphasis on religious experience.12 According to Knudson, Wesley rightly saw that the only genuine religion is experienced religion and this insight had in itself the germ of a new empirical type of theology. Thus, Wesley did much to prepare the way for the empirical theology commonly associated with Schleiermacher and Ritschl. On this reading, Wesley's greatness really lay in his initiation of classical liberalism rather than in his suggestions about Biblical authority. So if the use of a quadrilateral links Knudson to Wesley, this is our perception not his.

There is a clear hint in this observation that all is far from well in Knudson's avowals about the nature of authority. How can he hold to the quadrilateral and the common warrant for construing Scripture as preeminently authoritative and at the same time see Wesley's greatness in his providing the germ of the new era associated with Schleiermacher and his Methodist admirers in America? The inconsistency inherent in this unfolds as we explore how Knudson explains the distinction between the old and new eras in theology.

For Knudson, the new era meant the end of supernaturalism and an end to the old dogmatic theology which appealed to an external standard such as the Bible. It meant an end to divine intervention in the world construed as a violation of the laws of nature and an end to the old argument from miracles and prophecy. It meant an end to the old distinction between natural theology and revealed theology and an end to the notion of Biblical or ecclesiastical infallibility. It meant an end to the subordination of faith to reason and an end to the warfare between theology and philosophy. Positively, a whole new era had been born. This meant the beginning of a new kind of critical theology where the norms and standards were located within the human mind. It meant a new analysis of divine activity which saw God at work in all events and a new emphasis on divine immanence which gave substance to thus proposal. It meant a new view of revelation which saw divine revelation as another dimension of human insight and discovery. It meant a new alliance between faith and reason where theology turned to the post-Kantian idealism of Lotze and Bowne to find suitable metaphysical muscle for its future endeavors.

It is surely clear by now that there is a fundamental contradiction within Knudson's doctrinal commitments. On the one hand, when he deals with the sources of theology, he speaks as if the authority of the Bible remains intact and secure. One can read this section of his work and easily imagine that it is Wesley who is speaking to us afresh. However elsewhere, when he deals with such issues as the nature of knowledge, the character of divine action, the status of revealed theology, the nature of method in theology, the necessary conditions of rationality, and the like, he dismantles the conceptual and intellectual foundations without which his own account of the authority of Scripture becomes a mere orphan bereft of status and parentage. As one reads these sections of Knudson, one meets an entirely different Knudson. One encounters a figure utterly unlike Wesley in his commitments. Indeed, Knudson either ignores Wesley entirely on these issues or seriously misreads what he has to say about the nature of religious experience. It is the latter Knudson who in my opinion is the real Knudson of history and it is certainly the latter Knudson that is the Knudson of faith who has shaped much of modern Methodist theology.

Actually, the ignoring and reshaping of Wesley's ideas already takes place in Knudson's rendering of the four elements that are constitutive of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Thus, initially, Knudson makes clear that when he refers to Scripture as the primary source of theology, he means the whole canon of sixty-six books. However, elsewhere, this disintegrates by degrees. Thus, although opposed to Marcionite tendencies in theory, in practice the Old Testament is reduced to a strong bias in favor of the prophetic material;13 and this in turn is totally subordinate in an uncomplicated way to the New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures have value,

but there is much in them that is sub Christian or extra Christian, and this needs to be distinguished from the Christian element. What is truly Christian can be determined only by appealing to the New Testament. It is the revelation made in and through Christ that is the source and norm of Christian truth.14

By the New Testament, Knudson means here all the books of the New Testament, at least initially. "It is the Whole New Testament, not any selection of the Synoptic Gospels, that is and that will remain the chief source and norm of Christian theology."15 Yet even the New Testament in due course ceases to be a norm in any serious sense of the word. When Knudson elaborates his views on theological method, he returns to the theme that it is Jesus Christ who is the norm and then leaves wide open what that might mean.

The accepted norm for determining what is truly Christian and what is not will be found in Jesus Christ. But what in Him is actually normative? Is it His teaching? Is it the principle of Christianity embodied to Him? Is it His inner life? Or is it the transcendent fact that He is the incarnate Son of God? All of these are value judgments. To some extent, their correctness can be determined by a study of Biblical and Christian history. But answers cannot be decided by purely objective considerations. A subjective factor is involved in every answer to it.16

What began as a clear thesis about the limits of the canon has degenerated by degrees into vague discourse about the subjective dimension of value-judgments.17 Later, we shall see why this confusion is inevitable Knudson.

Knudson is also reworking the meaning of tradition, reason, and experience and turning them into something radically different from anything one finds in Wesley. Take tradition. For Wesley, this meant primarily the creeds of the early church mediated through the cardinal documents of the Anglican tradition. Knudson expounds tradition to include not only the whole history of the Christian church, but also the religious life and beliefs of humans in general. This immediately increased the work load of the theologian considerably. The study of history, psychology, and philosophy of religion are now regarded as "contributory to Christian theology."18

Reason, too, is changed out of all recognition to what one finds in Wesley. Wesley was utterly committed to reason, but he was very careful to spell out what he meant by reason and what its limits were. Wesley's qualified appeal to reason understood primarily as the art of perceiving, description, and inference19 is replaced in Knudson by reason understood as the "contributions made by theistic philosophy to the Christian faith."20 This is a crucial shift, for it undergirds Knudson's move to incorporate the metaphysics of idealism as developed by Kant, Fichte, and Bowne into the substance of his theology. It also provides the warrant for Knudson's unbounded confidence in a speculative philosophy which has no place for anything derived independently from special revelation. Where Wesley is guarded and cautious enough to confess that natural theology without revealed theology and evangelical experience drives him to despair and suicide, Knudson rests his whole case for the intellectual foundations of Christianity on the viability and superiority of a personalist metaphysics.21 The whole tone and concept of Wesley's approach to reason has been turned on its head.

Equally with the concept of experience. For Wesley, evangelical experience is utterly crucial. Without a deep encounter with the living God wherein we become aware of the things of the Spirit through the witness of the divine Spirit, we are in darkness and death. Knudson, however, is very ambivalent in his attitude to any religious experience construed on perceptual lines. For him, the concept of experience properly defined stands for the religious a priori. There is a native religious capacity of the human mind which is underivable and autonomously valid.22 Like moral experience, sense experience, and aesthetic experience, religious experience stands as an autonomous region of reason, constituted by its own ultimate standard and test of truth. This religious a priori is constitutive of human nature;23 it is the creative source of religious experience;24 it is logically distinct from specifically Christian experience or consciousness;25 it is self justifying, requiring no extraneous support;26 it provides its own immediate certitude of God;27 and it takes the place of the Biblical, ecclesiastical, and rationalistic authorities of the past.28 This is an entirely different world from anything even remotely available in Wesley. The darkness and despair of the human condition outside divine revelation and the intimate work of the Holy Spirit has been replaced by a thoroughgoing epistemic optimism about the human condition. This is based on a post-Kantian theory of knowledge which construes religious truth as universal, necessary, underivable, and autonomous. In turn, this leads to a complete dismantling and reworking of the material content of Wesleyan theology. Everything from the Trinity, the incarnation, faith, the witness of the Spirit, miracle, sin, freedom, regeneration, special revelation, inspiration, assurance, natural theology, and the like, are either rejected or reformulated to fit in with the epistemology and metaphysics of personal idealism.

We are now in a position to see why Knudson, although he is initially and superficially committed to Biblical authority and the warrants for its special place within the quadrilateral, ultimately undermines this avowal. Originally, the quadrilateral only made sense against the background of the kind of classical supernaturalism which one finds in Wesley. Wesley can appeal to Scripture as he does because he believes that God has intervened in history and in the production of the Scripture to give us knowledge of God's saving activity and intentions. As Wesley sees it, this knowledge is not available either in the common religious experience of the world religions, nor in human intuition, nor in some religious a priori, nor in some inference from the natural world. Moreover, for Wesley, Scripture has primacy not because the community says it has primacy, nor because we simply agree to give it primacy in an act of faith, nor because we encounter some ineffable divine word when we read it; Scripture has primacy because it was objectively and actually brought into being by divine inspiration and divine dictation. To be sure, we will never see or believe this unless we are reconstituted or repaired in the depths of our nature by the operation of the Holy Spirit in our inmost beings. Until the Spirit makes us new creatures in Christ, giving us new senses to understand the divine world, then we will be in darkness about God and His activity. But it is divine supernatural activity in the origins of the Bible and in the events it narrates which provides the crucial warrant for construing the Bible as the controlling, external source in theology. In Knudson, however, the concept of an external standard and the concept of supernatural action in the world have both been rejected as unacceptable in the new era of Methodist theology. We need now to pause and explore this in some detail.

The concept of an external standard was unacceptable because it ran foul of the epistemological principle that all standards of truth must be located within the mind rather than outside the mind. "There is no fixed body of revealed truth, accepted on authority, that stands opposed to the truth of reason. All truth today rests on its power of appeal to the human mind. There is no external standard of truth. The only standard is within the human mind itself."29 As a result, the distinction between revelation and natural reason is empty, for we now look upon the highest insights of reason as themselves divine revelations.30 Moreover, theology must now become "critical" rather than "dogmatic," renouncing all appeal to an external, infallible Bible and find the basis for theology in some sort of religious epistemology.31

This treatment of the concept of an external standard explains why Knudson becomes so confused and obscurantist in his treatment of the canon of Scripture. We noted earlier how he destroyed by degrees any serious appeal to the Bible in theology, jettisoning first the Old Testament for the New Testament, and then jettisoning the New Testament for Jesus Christ, and then dissolving Jesus Christ into a series of questions that in turn became semi subjective value judgments.32 Knudson is here halfheartedly working out the logic of his confused epistemology. If the Bible is an external standard and has to go; so, too, does Jesus Christ have to go for He, too, constitutes an external standard on Knudson's analysis. So no wonder he is obscurantist about what it is in Christ that can function as a warrant in theology. He is still clinging to the worn-out vestiges of an external standard that has been deliberately repudiated in the name of religious epistemology.

That epistemology is itself thoroughly confused. Knudson could have seen this if he had read either Wesley, Watson, or even Miley with any care. Miley, for example, is adamant about both Biblical authority and giving reasons for accepting Biblical authority. Indeed what is striking in Miley is the length to which he goes to ground Biblical authority in claims which he thinks are acceptable to reason and the mind. It matters little whether Miley's appeal to miracle and prophecy to ground Biblical authority works materially. What matters is that the project is entirely coherent, something it could not be if Knudson was correct.

This point needs to be expressed formally rather than historically. What Knudson has rightly seen is that A will not believe p unless p is acceptable to A's mind. We can construe thus either as a psychological remark about belief or a comment on the logic of the verb "to believe." This should not, however, be confused with a claim about the evidence or warrants or standards of belief, as if these should be internal to the mind. Criteria, standards, warrants, evidence, and the like can in a perfectly good sense be either internal or external to the mind. Thus, if I want to know the meaning of an obscure French verb, it is futile to appeal to some standard internal to my mind (whatever that would be); I will appeal to an external standard like a dictionary or a native French speaker to resolve this issue. To be sure, the standard itself will for some reason or other be acceptable to my mind else I would not appeal to it. But this does nothing to show that I cannot appeal to the external standard in the first place for that is exactly what we all would do. Knudson has confused certain conditions of believing with the criteria or warrants of belief.33 These are logically distinct and it is intellectual folly to argue from the character of the former to the character of the latter. Hence, his rejection of Biblical authority on epistemological grounds is in that respect a manifest error.

The other reason Knudson offers for rejecting Biblical authority involves an interesting and now widely accepted analysis of divine action. Over against any view which would involve divine intervention in the world, Knudson holds that divine action is always immanent in the natural order. For Knudson, there are no miracles in the Humean sense— supernaturalism in the classical sense is dead. When God acts in the world, He does so in, with, and through normal events of nature and history.

. . . there is no fundamental or metaphysical difference between the natural and the miraculous. All nature is grounded in the will of God, and by "natural," we mean simply the familiar and by the "miraculous" an unfamiliar method of the divine working. Both are divine or supernatural in their causation.34

Modern versions of this thesis have deployed a variety of arguments to secure its acceptance. Knudson grounded his acceptance mainly in his idealistic metaphysics. "According to idealism, a miracle is simply an extraordinary event that reveals divine agency in a more striking way than do ordinary events."35 He explains his position more fully as follows.

On the basis of an idealistic theism, nature as a whole owes its existence to the direct cause of God. All events are supernatural in their causation. There is in the material world no distinction between The First Cause and "secondary" causes. The First Cause is immediately operative in all things. Hence, there is no special class of "miraculous" events that owe their origin in an exclusive way to divine agency, nor are there any "natural" events that owe their origin to a metaphysical nature or to impersonal forces resident in it. From the standpoint of idealistic theism what is called the "natural" means simply the familiar, and what is called the "miraculous" means the unfamiliar. In other words, miracle is mirabile, not miraculum.36

Given such an account of divine action, it is only consistency that drives Knudson to dismantle his initial commitment to Biblical authority. Until recently, it was normal to construe Biblical authority as part of a wider vision of the universe which saw God as intervening within history. In other words, Biblical authority was intimately related to supernaturalism. Thus, Biblical authority was tied to a doctrine of divine revelation which stressed divine intervention in Israel, in Christ, and in the complex process which led to the production of the Bible. Knudson sums up his attitude to this type of view with characteristic boldness.

This exclusive supernaturalistic method of grounding the finality of the Christian religion stands close to popular religious thought. It was developed during the medieval period, and in its most pronounced form was widely held by Protestant theologians down to a century or two ago. It crumbled, however, before the advance of Biblical criticism, of natural science, and of the modern philosophy of the divine immanence, and today represents an "overcome standpoint."37

It is worthy of note here that Knudson goes beyond an appeal to his idealistic metaphysics to support his rejection of divine intervention. He appeals to the impact of history and science to provide further warrants for his position. Clearly, Knudson's proposals at this point are of pivotal significance. The issues he raises continue to enliven the modern discussion about the concept and character of divine action, the relation between God and the world, the nature of divine revelation, the concept of miracle, the logic of historical inquiry, the grammar of scientific explanation, and the like.38 Hence, it is difficult to say anything definitive or convincing in a paper only tangentially related to such complex issues. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think the following points deserve at least a brief mention.

First, it is interesting that Miley's concept of miracle represents an unstable half-way house between the classical, Humean conception and that of Knudson. For Miley, miracles are supernatural events wrought by the immediate agency of God, but they do not involve any abrogation or suspension of the laws of nature.

The divine energizing touches the law of nature simply at the point of the miracle, and in a manner to produce it, but no more abrogates or suspends such law, as a law of nature, than the casting a stone into the air annuls the law of gravitation.39

Knudson's account, whether acceptable or not, represents a vast improvement on this analysis.

Second, Knudson is correct to insist that his revised "idealistic" analysis once accepted calls for drastic reconstruction in one's theology as a whole. His failure to carry through the program in the area of Biblical authority does not detract from his formal recognition of this fact nor from the valiant efforts he made to rework the material content of systematic theology. One cannot reject divine intervention and then proceed to insist that we can borrow from Wesley and his classical forbears as if life goes on as usual. Knudson had the courage to see this. He bent his efforts to breaking point to provide Methodism with what he hoped would be a better legacy than that bequeathed to it by Wesley and his nineteenth century successors.

Thirdly, as an academic theologian, Knudson stands without peer among Methodists and Wesleyans in his generation. Even the best conservatives look mediocre beside him. It is small wonder that he captured the hearts and minds of a host of followers and admirers within Methodism. His clarity of expression, his pious spirit, his skillful assault on materialism and positivism, his well read mind, his grasp of the history of doctrine, his contribution to the highways of post-Kantian philosophy, his deep desire to serve the intellectual cause of Christianity in the modern world, all these and much more reveal a man who comes close to being a genius.

Yet the end result was a tragic disaster. What Knudson said about Miley's works could be applied to his own proposals: they were obsolete as soon as they fell from the press. Knudson's idealism is a lost cause. The epistemology and tortuous arguments that undergird it are now of purely historical interest. Knudson's attempt to develop a theory of the religious a priori as a way to salvage the appeal to religious experience lacks the perceptual dimension or content that can alone give it cognitive purchase. His analysis of science is strikingly naive and his remarks about the impact of historical criticism are too dogmatic and cryptic to carry much weight. Neither do justice to the complex results and logic of historical and scientific investigation. Nor do they begin to fathom the way in which a classical vision of divine action, complete with a substantial but sensitive commitment to divine intervention, can be combined with these as mutually enriching friends rather than mortal enemies. His brief and very general analysis of divine agency lacks conceptual vigor. Nor does it begin to map the complex logic of divine action mediated in such concepts as creation, providence, revelation, inspiration, incarnation, regeneration, justification, adoption, sanctification, and a host of other actions and activities that God has performed for our salvation. Perhaps when we make some advances in this area, we will be able to return to our Wesleyan sources and make a fully consistent appropriation of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. So long as our talk of divine action amounts to little more than rhetorical flourishes about divine presence, divine immanence, divine providence, or general divine agency, then we are in much the same old, rickety boat that was constructed by Knudson. The paint work may have been patched up here and there, sails may have been added for decorative purposes, but the leaks in the fuel tanks and engine room have been left unattended. In such circumstances, the quadrilateral will remain exactly what it was in Knudson, a mere theological orphan, hopelessly lost at sea and bereft of status and parentage. Clearly, Wesleyans who want to reinstate the quadrilateral have plenty to occupy them in the coming years.

Notes

1 John Miley, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1893), pp. 7-12.

2 Knudson rarely enters into serious dialogue with his predecessors in the tradition.

3 Albert C. Knudson, "Methodism," in An Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 488.

4 Idem.

5 Idem.

6 In my view, the Wesleyan quadrilateral is a genuine element in Wesley's own theology. I have argued this in an unpublished paper, "The Wesleyan Quadrilateral."

7 Albert C. Knudson, The Doctrine of God (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1930) chap. 5.

8 Ibid, p. 175.

9 Ibid., pp. 175-6.

10 Ibid, p. 176.

11 Ibid, p. 187.

12 "Methodism," p. 488. Elsewhere, Knudson suggests that it is an emphasis on some degree of human freedom which is the chief Wesleyan contribution to Christian theology. See The Validity of Religious Experience (New York: Abingdon, 1937), p. 206.

13 This emerges most clearly in his use of the prophets as the symbol for the essence of the best or true type of religion. See The Doctrine of God, pp. 54-60.

14 The Doctrine of God, p. 178.

15 Ibid., p. 182.

16 Ibid, pp. 196-7.

17 This vagueness also surfaces in Knudson's discussion of the "essence" of religion. See The Doctrine of God pp. 123-4.

18 Ibid, p. 175.

19 These are not Wesley's terms, but this is fundamentally what Wesley meant when he spoke of apprehension, judgment and discourse.

20 Ibid., p. 184.

21 Knudson is insistent that personalism provides the metaphysical foundations for Christian belief. Ibid, p. 170.

22 The Validity of Religious Experience, p. 166. Cf. The Philosophy of Personalism, p. 251.

23 The Validity of Religious Experience, p. 162.

24 Idem.

25 Ibid, pp. 186-7.

26 Ibid, p. 161.

27 Idem.

28 Idem.

29 The Doctrine of God, p. 173.

30 Idem.

31 Ibid, p. 190.

32 See above p. 8.

33 Compare Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977), p. 98.

34 Basic Issues in Christian Thought (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950), p. 152.

35 The Doctrine of Redemption (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1933), p. 60.

36 Ibid, p. 58.

37 The Doctrine of God, p. 110.

38 There is striking similarity between Knudson's views on some of these issues and Maurice Wiles' position. See the latter's The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (London: SCM, 1974).

39 Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 33.

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