A Preface to Christian Faith in a New Age

Rufus M. Jones published A Preface to Christian Faith in a New Age in 1932, near the end of a long career as a Quaker philosopher and historian of mysticism at Haverford College. The book arrived in a moment of real strain for religious thought. The Great Depression was deepening, the confident liberal optimism of the early twentieth century had been shaken by the First World War, and the authority of Scripture and creed had been pressed hard by both scientific naturalism and the Fundamentalist reaction against it. Jones wrote as someone unwilling to choose between a faith frozen in old formulas and a modern outlook that had no room for God.

The argument rests on a conviction Jones held throughout his life: that religion begins in direct experience of God rather than in doctrine, and that such experience is available to ordinary people. From this ground he sets out to restate Christian faith for readers shaped by modern science and criticism. He does not treat the new knowledge as an enemy. He holds that a faith resting on living encounter with God can absorb it, and that an honest examination of human life, with its moral aspiration, its sense of beauty, and its hunger for communion, points toward a spiritual presence meeting us from beyond ourselves. Christ stands at the center of this account as the supreme revelation of what God is like and of what human life can become, and the church is understood as a fellowship of persons gathered by that shared life more than as an institution guarding fixed propositions. Jones is candid about the limits of dogmatic certainty, and equally candid that the loss of dogmatic certainty need not mean the loss of faith.

The book remains a clear statement of the experiential, mystical strand of liberal Protestantism and of the Quaker tradition's habit of locating authority in the inward life of the believer. Its tone is irenic and its prose accessible, which sets it apart from much theological writing of its era. Readers will also notice how much of its confidence belongs to its moment. The sharper critiques of liberalism that followed, especially from neo-orthodox theologians, pressed on exactly the points where Jones is most hopeful about human capacities, and the book is best read with that conversation in mind.

Who should read this: Readers who want to understand how a thoughtful Quaker mystic tried to hold together inward experience, modern knowledge, and devotion to Christ, and those drawn to the Quaker and mystical traditions of spiritual formation. It is not for readers seeking a defense of classical doctrinal formulations or a robust account of human sinfulness, since Jones deliberately sets his emphasis elsewhere.