Home Up David's Stuff Links Thoughts Stuff Stuff Read 

                              RELIGIOUS RATIONALISM



     THIS IS AN ESSAY WRITTEN BY MY DAD FEBRUARY 10,1950

            1.Although the drunkard, the gambler, the criminal,
    the agnostic, and the lawless are in serious trouble
    with God, they are by no means the greatest enemies of
    Christianity.
        As the termite working within a wooden structure
    poses a greater hazard than detectable deterioration on
    the outside, just so the religious rationalist, or
    modernist, disguised as a Christian leader and working
    within the confines of religious profession, is a
    greater enemy of the gospel than it’s declared
    opponents or it’s un-related pacifists.

    ========================================================

          2.I have had occasion to make observations of these
    people, particularly ministers, who will accept nothing
    from the Bible that will not bow down and do obeisance
    to their own reason.
        But the religion of Jesus Christ is a religion of
    faith, or God would never have inspired the apostle
    Paul to write, “Without faith it is impossible to
    please God”; and “ Faith is the evidence of things not
    seen.”
        But many of these rationalistic leaders of some of
    our largest Protestant denominations are making havoc
    of peoples faith by their syllogistic teaching which,
    as a termite, eats out the heart of their willing-ness
    to take God at His Word.

    ========================================================

         3.What do these religious rationalists teach?
        An incomplete list of their conjectures are these.
        While still posing as Christian teachers, they
    contend that the virgin birth of Christ and His bodily
    resurrection are absurdities that the Scripture writers
    penned under the influence of mythology and pagan
    fables. Yet these two immutable truths are
    indispensable to true faith in a holy and eternal
    Christ.
        They also indict the doctrine of the blood
    atonement of Jesus Christ for mankind as, “slaughter-
    house religion” and fit only for the dark ages.  
        Evolution to them is the only “reasonable”
    explanation of existence.
        God is the father of all – no matter what people
    believe or how they live – and everybody will get to
    heaven sooner or later, they claim, since there is to
    be no judge external to themselves. More faith-
    quenching propaganda is that Christ was not divine,
    being a mere teacher of a high standard of ethics, and
    that because of His exemplary life, He was mistaken by
    the credulous to be Deity.

    ========================================================

           4.Religion has always had it’s scarecrows of
    fanaticism, but these are mere pebbles on the beach
    compared to this heretical modernism that cries
    “reason, reason!” when there is no faith. Faith never
    contradicts reason:it simply transcends it.I know God
    is in the Bible because He came out of it – to my own
    heart.

    ========================================================
    ==

    My dad’s professor wrote “very good” at the top of this
    essay….David