Herbert Arthur Hodges (1905–1976): Christian Philosopher, Believing sceptic

• Published in: Four Philosophical Anglicans pp. 215 - 284
• Main Author: Sell, Alan P.F.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Routledge 2010; Taylor & Francis Group
• Subjects: Christian theology; Philosophy of religion; Human Sciences; Dilthey’s Position; Sceptical Predicament; St Sergius; Undivided Church; Riddell Memorial Lecture; Literae Humaniores; Dilthey’s Thought; Infant Baptism; SCM Press; United Methodist Free Churches; Eastern Church; Contemporary Philosophical Debates; Modern World View; Aristotelian Society; Rival Standpoint; Epistemic Skepticism; Lukas Vischer; Congregational Scholar; Gifford Lectures; United Methodist Church; Edward Stillingfleet; Drawn Back; Twentieth Century English Philosopher; Natural Theology
• ISBN: 9781409400592; 140940059X
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315255095-11

I can think of no twentieth-century English philosopher other than H. A. Hodges whose obituary in The Times is headed, ‘Philosopher and Christian’.1 The conjunction is important. Hodges was not a ‘Christian philosopher’ in the sense of one who in all his work set out from uncriticized Christian assumptions (least of all from an allegedly inerrant Bible) with a view to presenting a tightly-knit scheme, however abstracted from the intellectual and cultural world around him. He was a professional philosopher who was by conviction a Christian, and in the heyday of Oxford positivism and linguistic analysis, that marked him out as being somewhat unusual. But Hodges was his own man, and with that resolve for which Yorkshiremen are noted, he ploughed his own furrow in philosophy and religion alike. As to the former, his intensive studies in German philosophy distinguished him from many of his philosophical contemporaries, and ‘He seldom felt himself called to enter into the contemporary philosophical debates which occupied the minds of so many of his colleagues in the university world.’2 As to the latter, his pilgrimage took him from Methodism through (brief) atheism to the Church of England, and to increasing empathy with Orthodox theology and liturgy.