MARLPIT PRESSIndependent PublisherSupernatural Christianity and Historical Criticism
Selwyn’s governing question is whether criticism can revise inherited formulations without being allowed to abolish the supernatural before the argument begins.
The postwar problem
Selwyn writes after the First World War, when confidence in inevitable progress had become much harder to sustain. Scientific power had proved compatible with destruction as well as enlightenment.
That matters because he refuses to treat science as a complete philosophy of life. Scientific method can describe and explain, but it cannot by itself settle the religious meaning of reality.
The autonomy of the supernatural
Selwyn begins by insisting on the reality and autonomy of the supernatural. The supernatural cannot survive if it is merely a name for psychological states, social ideals, or unexplained natural events.
His project therefore requires Christianity’s central claims to retain objective reference beyond the believer’s consciousness.
What criticism is allowed to do
Historical criticism can distinguish sources, reconstruct contexts, test traditions, and expose weak historical arguments. Selwyn accepts that kind of work as intellectually legitimate.
He resists the further move in which historical method is quietly turned into metaphysical naturalism. A method designed to study historical evidence cannot simply decree in advance that supernatural reality is impossible.
Psychology and religious experience
Modern psychology had made religious experience a subject of systematic study. Selwyn takes those discoveries seriously while refusing reductionism.
An experience may have psychological conditions and still point to a reality that psychology alone cannot adjudicate.
The test case of Christianity
The strength of Selwyn’s book lies in the way the general argument is carried into concrete Christian claims: revelation, Christ, Atonement, Resurrection, the Church, sacramental religion, and Christian character.
The question throughout is whether a critically informed reader can affirm those claims as more than symbols.
Research basis
This note draws on The Approach to Christianity, its index and Marlpit Press edition materials, contemporary 1926 reviews and publisher advertising, and biographical sources on Edward Gordon Selwyn.
- Edward Gordon Selwyn, The Approach to Christianity (Longmans, Green & Co., 1925)
- J. M. Creed, review in The Journal of Theological Studies (April 1926)
- The Churchman, review under “Anglo-Catholic Philosophy” (1926)
- London Quarterly Review, “Theology and Apologetics” review notice (1926)
- Longmans, Green & Co. publisher advertisements for The Approach to Christianity
- Biographical records of Edward Gordon Selwyn and his editorship of Theology
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