Joseph Butler

Joseph Butler (1692–1752) was an English bishop and theologian of the Church of England, author of the Fifteen Sermons and of The Analogy of Religion (1736), who defended the Christian faith against the deists of his age by arguing from the analogy between nature and revelation, and who taught that for human beings probability, not demonstration, is the proper basis of judgment and action. He is remembered as one of the outstanding figures of eighteenth-century Anglican theology.

Life

Butler was born at Wantage in Berkshire on 18 May 1692, into a Presbyterian family. He was educated first at a dissenting academy, at Gloucester and then at Tewkesbury, where he entered into a youthful correspondence on theology that showed his early promise. Having decided to conform to the Church of England, he entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1715, took his degree, and was ordained deacon and then priest in 1718.

In 1719 Butler became preacher at the Rolls Chapel in London, a post he held until 1726; the sermons he preached there made his reputation. He was rector of Stanhope in County Durham from 1725, and the quiet years at Stanhope were largely devoted to writing the Analogy. After its publication in 1736 he rose steadily: he was made bishop of Bristol in 1738, dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1740, and bishop of Durham in 1750. He died at Bath on 16 June 1752, and was buried in Bristol Cathedral.

The Fifteen Sermons

The Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726) are sermons on human nature, preached as Butler worked out a moral psychology from the constitution of man. Butler argues that human nature is a system or constitution made up of particular passions and affections, the principle of self-love, the principle of benevolence, and, above them all, conscience: the faculty of reflection by which a man approves or disapproves his own actions, and which carries with it a natural supremacy and authority over the rest. Two of the sermons treat the love of our neighbour, showing that benevolence is no less a part of human nature than self-love and that the two principles are not rivals. Two more treat resentment and the forgiveness of injuries, distinguishing sudden and settled resentment: resentment is a weapon placed in human hands against injury and injustice, but in its settled form, as deliberate resentment, it is forbidden by the Christian law of forgiveness, and the sermons explain how injury is to be forgiven without denying that it was an injury. AnglicanWiki hosts the Fifteen Sermons, which remains Butler's most widely read work on ethics.

The Analogy of Religion

The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736) is Butler's major work of apologetics, directed against the deists, who accepted a bare "natural religion" while rejecting the revelation of Scripture. Butler's method is set out in his Introduction: since human beings are creatures of limited faculties, they cannot expect demonstrative certainty in religion, for such matters rest on probable evidence; but probable evidence, he argues, is the kind of evidence on which all practical life already depends — "to us, probability is the very guide of life." He then argues by analogy: the constitution and course of nature, as we find them by experience, exhibit the same features that are objected to in revealed religion — a government of rewards and punishments, mediated and progressive, full of apparent irregularities which our limited understanding cannot fully explain. If those features are no argument against believing that nature is God's work, they can be no argument against the credibility of a revelation which displays the same character, and which may therefore reasonably come from the same author.

References

• Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, James, John and Paul Knapton, 1736.
• The Works of Joseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone, Clarendon Press, 1896.
• Terence Penelhum, Butler, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.