Wilfrid Ward on the Revelatory Nature of the Saints

DOI

10.3390/rel14101306

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

10-1-2023

Publication Title

Religions

Volume

14

Issue

10

Keywords

agnosticism, Catholicism, divine revelation, ecclesiology, John Henry Newman, positivism, saints, Synthetic Society, Wilfrid Ward

Abstract

This article examines how Wilfrid Philip Ward (1856–1916) explains his understanding of the saints as a categorical means of explicating divine revelation within the structures of a religion, particularly Catholicism. A description of the late nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, as perceived by Ward, is provided, followed by an explanation of how Ward responds philosophically to his perceived Zeitgeist with a description of the saints as revelatory of the incarnation in the particularity of historical and social contexts of those outside of the historical Jesus’s own context. This article concludes that Ward’s epistemology of the saints is the foundation for his incarnational ecclesiology.

Open Access

Gold

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