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From: pmd@cbdkc1.UUCP (Paul M. Dubuc)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Reply to Stuart Gathman on (historical) causal imputation
Message-ID: <1605@cbdkc1.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Sep-86 12:09:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbdkc1.1605
Posted: Mon Sep 29 12:09:28 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 2-Oct-86 19:47:28 EDT
References: <3335@umcp-cs.UUCP> <970@hou2g.UUCP> <638@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> <217@BMS-AT.UUCP> <654@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Reply-To: pmd@dkc1.UUCP (Paul M. Dubuc)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
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Xref: linus talk.religion.misc:322 net.religion.christian:4786

In article <654@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> gary@sphinx.UUCP (Gary Buchholz) writes:
>
>  "...much of recent Protestant theology may be regarded as a series
>   of salvage operations, that is, attempts to reconcile the ethic of
>   of critical historical inquiry with the apparent demands of Christian
>   faith.  They are efforts to turn aside the criticism that one can be
>   a believer only at the price of sacrificing the standards of truth
>   and honesty which have dominated the scholarly community since the 
>   Enlightenment.  ...there is considerable pathos in these apologetic
>   efforts.  It was, after all, Christianity that tutored the Western
>   mind to believe that it should know the truth and the truth would 
>   make it free.  But now that the student has learned to prize the
>   truth, he has discovered, with pain ...that it can only be gained at the
>   cost of rejecting the one who first instilled in him the love of it."
>
>                                       --The Historian and the Believer
>                                         Van Harvey  p 246

This is a rather self-serving claim to possess the truth by adherents
of Enlightenment Religion.  Still, it *is* ironic.  The one who
said that we should know the truth and it would set us free also
said, "I am the way, the *truth* and the life...".  

Seems to me that an equally likely possibility is that the sons of
the Enlightenment are thowing the term "truth" around in a manner not
unlike the sons of fundamentalism.  They have modified the concept of
truth to meet the apparent demands of intellectual integrity and it is
that concept they follow in their desire to know the truth while thinking
that they must reject the One who is the truth in order to do so.

If much of Protestant theology is to be likened to a "salvage operation"
(performing surgery on the Tree of Knowledge, you might say),
I would also suggest that the activities of Enlightenment theologians
can, with equal clarity, be seen as an attempt to escape the "salvage
operations" by sawing off the branch on which they stand.
-- 

Paul Dubuc	cbdkc1!pmd