John Wood Oman, the philosopher of religion and theologian, was a Scotsman from the Orkney Islands. After being educated at Edinburgh and Heidelberg universities and serving for seventeen years in a rural pastorate in Northumberland, he taught for twenty-eight years at Westminster College, Cambridge, the seminary of the English Presbyterian Church. The chief influence on his developing thought was that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose Reden Oman translated into English.

In the massive The Natural and the Supernatural (1931) Oman portrays the root of religion as man's immediate sense of the Supernatural. The primary religious awareness is not inferential but is, in words that Oman used to describe the similar conception of Schleiermacher, "intuition of reality, an intercourse between a universe, present always in all its meaning, and a spirit, responding with all its understanding" (p. 36). By the Supernatural, Oman does not mean the...