Stewart Sutherland: an appreciation

Stewart Sutherland, who died on  January , was editor of Religious Studies from  to . He was a philosopher with an interest in religion, particularly in Christianity as a ‘form of life’ which offers a distinctive practical understanding of what it is to live well as a human being. He explicitly set out to provide a revisionary development of Christian tradition, believing that the legacy of Christian theism offered something of great value to society and to individuals. He said himself that his revisionary view would probably not score very highly on the scale of orthodoxy. But he thought that the language and practices of Christian faith made possible a view of life and a way of living in the world that was distinctive and difficult, if not impossible, to express in any other way. Thus, his view seeks both to preserve a specific religious outlook and yet to revise that outlook in radically new ways. It neither defends a form of religious orthodoxy nor dismisses religion as false or irrelevant. What he writes is a significant contribution to thinking about the place of religion in the modern world, and an important contribution to rethinking the nature of religious faith. His view is outlined in many papers and articles, but mainly in three books, Atheism and the Rejection of God (), Faith and Ambiguity (), and God, Jesus, and Belief (). The first of these is an engagement with Dostoevsky, especially with The Brothers Karamazov, and with the central conversation in that book between the brothers Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov about the reality of suffering and evil in the world. This interest is central for Sutherland, for it illustrates the importance for him of literature as a vehicle of philosophical reflection, and also his conviction that any thinking about God must begin from a full acceptance that much suffering is real, morally unjustifiable, and destructive of many traditional ideas of God. Both of these convictions are controversial. Since the time of Plato, many have suspected that there is a war between poetry and literature on the one hand and philosophical truth on the other. The conversation of the Karamazovs illustrates Religious Studies (2018) 54, 447–453 © Cambridge University Press 2018 doi:10.1017/S0034412518000628