Humanism? Which one?
My fraternal grandfather Erasmus Powell Reed was born in DeKalb County, Alabama, in 1852. He was a lawyer, school teacher, postmaster and Baptist minister.
His father, also named Erasmus and also a Baptist minister, was a farmer and a veteran of the Indian Wars under General Andrew Jackson. Regrettably, his military service included removing the Cherokees to Oklahoma in the infamous “Trail of Tears” atrocity.
None of my grandfather’s occupations were full-time in the small north Alabama community of Collinsville where my great grandfather moved from South Carolina in the early 1800s. And he was never known as Erasmus
Jr. since his father died several months before his birth in 1852. He was generally known to everyone in DeKalb County as “Ras Reed.”
I never knew my grandfather, who died nine years before I was born, but I have always wondered about the origin of the rather unusual name “Erasmus” (sounds a little like “Rastus”). Investigation revealed my great-grandfather was named for the revered sixteenth-century Dutch New Testament scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) is recognized as one of the most influential scholars of Christian history — and also one of the most controversial, I might add. He was particularly revered for his knowledge and scholarship in the Greek language in which the New Testament was originally written.
After mastering Greek, Erasmus devoted the rest of his life to studying and interpreting the New Testament, with a special concentration on the Pauline Epistles, particularly the Epistle to the Romans. In 1516 he published the first translation of the New Testament into modern Greek.
His other religious writings also enjoyed considerable success and placed a special emphasis on one’s personal experience with Christ rather than the simple observation of traditional orthodox rites, doctrines, ceremonies and liturgies prescribed by the Church.
Erasmus’ writings included criticisms of certain clergymen for their moral laxity. He harbored an unwavering insistence that one’s true religion must include a moral Christ-centered life, not just the external trappings of the conventional religious practices of the day. He is especially credited with founding and expanding the concept of Christian humanism, still a controversial proposition even today.
Secular humanism was a favorite derisive adjective and whipping boy of the late founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University Jerry Falwell. He, as so many other fundamentalists, recognized only one type of humanism — secular humanism. But there is a decided difference between Christian humanists and humanists who might also happen to be religious.
Christian humanism, contradiction or not, is based on the idea of an inborn human dignity, personhood, individual freedom of thought, the primacy of human happiness and a general feeling of well-being. It has little to do with disbelief and doubt.
Nevertheless, many of today’s fundamentalists dismiss Christian humanism as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. “Humanism” is usually preceded in today’s writings and dialog by the modifier “secular,” meaning completely divorced from religious thought. But personal freedom, human emancipation and human rights are, according to Erasmus, inseparable from their Christian humanist roots.
Foremost among the forces supporting Christian humanism is the certainty that God became human in the person of Jesus in order to redeem humankind, to establish His church here on earth and to continue His mission through human discipleship and a belief in the risen Christ.
All too common today is the wrongful association of humanism with atheism and agnosticism. But among informed, thoughtful Christian believers, Christianity and humanism can, and do, quite amicably coexist.
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