Gmail - Euhemerism anyone? - jacobthanni@gmail.com

I found the following article I received in my mail interseting. The aricle was posted by one Larry. And he equates some modern scholars with euhemerists ofthe old. and to his support brings Nels F. S. Ferre's chapter inhis book Searchlights on contemporary Theology



TheEuhemerists, there were several, lived at a time when the Greek gods
were being called into question. According to this professor, the
Euhemerists were really the first religious-studies scholars, who
wanted to preserve belief in religion because of its social values. It seems the Euhemerists were the Rudolf Bultmanns and the PaulTillichs of their day.

I found an article by a prof Ferre (perhaps an old friend of Gabe's)
that seems to relate to this topic. I pasted it in below.


Larry



Searchlights on Contemporary Theology by Nels F. S. Ferré

Dr. Ferré was for many years Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at
Andover Newton Theological School. Copyright 1961 by Nels F.S. Ferré.
Published by Harper & Brothers, New York. All rights reserved by
Harper & Brothers. This material has been prepared for Religion Online
by Ted & Winnie Brock.


Chapter 7: Can Classical Christianity Be Defended?

The Christian faith centers in Christ. Christ is God come to earth in
a human being. The God who came is love. He is best known through the
Cross and the resurrection as suffering and victorious love. To all
who believe Him, who repent and are forgiven, God gives eternal life,
both here and beyond death.

Those who know such eternal life form a community of Christ, of free
and full love, creative and redemptive. Such is forever the heart of
the Christian faith.

Classical Christianity is flanked on both sides by false views of the
Christian faith. Let us think of the classical Christian faith as the
central castle in which true Christians live with deep satisfaction, a
stronghold that they are bound to defend, and a home in which is the
kind of life that is best for all people. It is the true home even of
those who are not within it. It is beset from without by enemies
anxious to raze it because they falsely feel themselves threatened by
it.

Of the false positions two are on the right and two are on the left of
the castle. On the extreme right are the fundamentalists. They are the
ones who are stirred into great rage because the true defenders of the
castle in this day of modern warfare are no longer using the crossbow.

They are more given to crying "heretic, heretic" at the true defenders
and to shooting them in the back with their bows and arrows than they
are to defending the castle itself with modern weapons and against the
real enemies.

This is to say that the fundamentalists want to identify true
Christianity with a literalism of the Bible which is impossible for
any honest and educated man of our day. We cannot believe in a world
made 6,000 years ago, in a flat earth with corners, or in a sun that
goes around the earth.

Nor can we believe that things in the Bible inconsistent with the love
of God in Christ are true or Christian. Neither is he blessed or right
who dasheth the little ones of his enemies against a stone or who
attributes the tortures of an eternal hell to the sovereign God of
love.

Next to the fundamentalists on the right side of the castle of
classical Christianity stand the neo-Calvinists. They believe in the
castle, but they do not believe it needs defense from, or
communication with, the people who are attacking it. They cry: "Our
castle is beautiful. Let us worship in it. It cannot be taken. Let us
praise it and enjoy it."

To interpret this part of the parable is to say that the
neoCalvinists, such as Karl Barth, do not believe in relating the
Christian message to the world either in terms of defense or of
intercommunication. They insist on the principle of unconditional
surrender on the part of the enemies. While they are right that the
castle is its own best recommendation and defense, they do not see
that the enemy outside is made up of those who belong inside and who
can be reached by concerned communication.

The Christian faith can win those outside when it is willing to show
on every needed level that it is saving truth and that it can truly
help and satisfy the very ones who are attacking. The Christian faith
should remain stoutly itself and at the same time reach out to
influence educational, social, and civic behavior.

Farthest on the left stand the demythologizers. They believe that the
castle of classical Christianity has no place in modern life. It can
no longer be defended because it is no necessary part of the Christian
faith. Therefore, they have gone out on the field in front of the
castle crying that the flag and the uniforms are what makes
Christianity Christian. Out on the field they fight both the defenders
of the castle (those who believe in an evangelical supernaturalism
centered in Christ) and those who are arrayed against the Christian
faith as a whole.

Within this body of warriors stand great thinkers like Rudolf Bultmann
in Europe and Paul Tillich in the United States, who have become
convinced that the objective structure of classical Christianity, a
God beyond this world and an eternal life beyond this world, can no
longer be believed in by men stringently trained in science.

They believe, however, that the original faith of the early Christians
was in the Cross and the resurrection as the power to overcome all the
enemies of human existence in this life by the power of reality, the
power for life and for love that are being contained within the very
ground of being. They keep, therefore, the symbols of faith and
discard the castle with which classical Christianity identified these
symbols. They give up the structure of faith while believing that they
have kept the faith itself.

Next to the castle on the left stand the liberals. They are busy with
plans to put new conveniences in the castle, to modernize it. They
want new plumbing, central heating, and some even want air
conditioning. Then they want to invite the enemy to inspect the castle
to see for themselves if the castle is not the best place in which to
live.

Interpreted, this part of the parable means that the liberals want to
be accepted by those who use general methods of truth. They do not
want to think of the Christian faith as different in kind from other
truth. They want instead to show that it is the forefront of all truth
concerning life’s meaning.

Christ becomes the great example and helper for men. He shows man what
true humanity can be like. He contains as much of God as man can; and
by accepting the God whose will and way we see in him, all men can
find their way to heaven and home.

Man is good because the God whom we see in Christ made him, and man’s
reason is a reliable tool for knowledge of salvation as well as for
knowledge of how to navigate the seas. What man needs is to become
serious and concerned with regard to the will of God. Then the God who
is love will give him a new social order and will grant him at last
either peace after life or life after death.

What then shall I say of this parable? I believe all positions to
contain genuine truths, but all positions, too, need to come home to
the castle. They need to move into the center. Fundamentalists are
right in defending classical Christianity in supernatural, evangelical
terms. God in Christ as creator, redeemer, and consummator is our only
hope. Christ is our Gospel, the God who came to earth as universal
holy love and who waits and woos to save us now.

The fundamentalists, however, need to listen to the demythologizers.
The extreme right needs to listen to the extreme left. The Bible needs
to be radically rethought in terms of Christ and the best knowledge we
have. Whatever in the Bible can be shaken by legitimate science is of
earthly knowledge. The heart of the Christian faith, God in Christ as
holy love, cannot be shaken.

Those on the extreme left, contrariwise, ought to recapture the vision
of the evangelical faith. My book Faith and Reason shows that the
structure of the classical Christian faith alone can satisfy the
fullest and most stringent demands for knowledge.

If the extremes come together in Christ, we shall keep the heart of
both the fundamentalist and the demythologizing drives: the drive for
a full, saving faith and the drive for integrity of knowledge within
faith.

Similarly, the neo-Calvinists ought to learn from the liberals, even
though the liberals revolted originally against them. Any neo-
Calvinist movement that has not passed through the liberal concern for
knowledge and for social responsibility finds itself in a brittle
position. It is an isolationist position that denies the Christian
faith at its heart.

At the same time, the liberal position has lost the Christian heart,
God’s own unique presence in Christ as Savior. It has surrendered the
claim for a special revelation that is obnoxious to man, who is
dominantly sinful and in need of redemption. The sinner will not and
cannot see the Christian revelation unless he repents and is born
again. When he does so, his eyes are cleansed by faith.

Let the neo-Calvinist learn that the Christian faith, though
distinctive, can and must be related to education and social
responsibility, even though in an unexpected and revolutionary way.
God’s love comes also as light, albeit as the "subversive fulfillment"
of the expectations of the natural man.

Let the liberal, too, return to the center of God’s holy presence in
Christ. When he does, he will find that his concern for the relevance
of truth and for social responsibility is helped, not hindered, by
Christ, the truth. He will have to reinterpret human nature as sinful
in the stronger light of God’s revelation in Christ, and the whole
question of community and communication will be revolutionized.

Those who return to the center will not, I believe, quickly leave the
castle. Christ is the answer, not the easy answer of repristination,
but the creatively demanding answer of constantly discovering how rich
and deep and satisfying is the universal love of God, issuing always
in open and concerned community. Christ is the creative, revolutionary
answer to man’s need for life and truth.