Evil and the Christian Faith by Nels F. S. Ferre (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~53 Evil and the Christian Faith. By NELS F. S. FERRE. New York: Harper and Bros., 1947. Pp. 169, with index. $2.50. Dr. Nels F. S. Ferre, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, has given us a book which is stimulating but marred by. obscurity and error; a book concerned with the problem of evil, which the author calls " my central problem " and to which he brings a solution containing the "very heart of my theology." The vecy heart of Dr. Ferre's theology is in Appendix A: The Christian Faith. One should read this section of the book first (along with Appendix B: Faith and Reason) to do justice to the author's thought. His interpretation of the Christian Faith: it is essentially Agape, " the kind of love which. God is, which received conclusive expression in Jesus, and which lives ever as the central and controlling reality wherever there is genuine Christian fellowship" (p. 140). This conception of Agape, the author carefully distinguishes from the highest reaches of the Greek mind and of Judaism and of any pre-Christian religion (pp. 140-142). There follows a brilliant synthesis of the richness of Agape: that God is Agape ("Ultimate is not a principle but a person," p. 148); that Agap is the full and final principle of explanation of any problem (p. 149); that Agape is Holiness and the raisond'etre of the sufferings of Christ and of all the saints (p. 150); that Agape is active love and that the central action of God in history was the Crucifixion (p. 152) ; that Agape is perfect wisdom and power and freedom (pp. 158-155); that Agape is perfect beauty (" beautiful is the face of God drawing our weary earth-stained eyes away from our selfish preoccupation. . . . The beautiful is the still overflowing of the harmony of God's eternity spilling over into our confused self-seeking," p. 156). The conclusion of Appendix B: Faith and Reason is that "all of us inescapably live primarily by faith " (p. 167) . But what is faith? Essentially , it is selection. "The only adequate faith is found in the most high. . . . To live in truth as far as one can is thus to keep deciding from within our best knowledge far beyond our best knowledge where the content of faith at the same time both fulfills and yet also denies the best that we can know" (p. 167). "The historic content of right religion, the pivot of faith, must not only be selected in terms of the right knowledge of our process as a whole, but also be assessed and certified in relation to it " (p. 168) . " The most high is thus to be discovered by being selected existentially out of a dynamic synthesis of faith and reason " (p. 169) . In his Introduction, Dr. Ferre points out that the problem of evil is a supernatural problem and must be solved in terms of the supernatural; he furthermore warns against partial, as well as mixed, perspectives in attempting a solution to the problem. These perspectives are carefully analyzed and criticized. 8 254 BOOK REVIEWS a) The Problem of Evil cannot be solved on the level of historic fact (a disjunct, concrete event in our history). No one single historic fact is self-explanatory ; nor is the whole historic process self-explanatory. The historic process is not the whole of reality and evil itself is only. a 'part of, or an aspect of, some becoming.' Part cannot explain part (pp. 5-8). b) The Problem of Evil cannot be solved merely on the aesthetic level-where the parts of the historic process might be in continual cacophony, and their symphony apparent to, and appreciated only by, God. Such a solution supposes a distorted view of God, arisinJl from an erroneous theology (e. g. of Calvin) or from a hazy physico-mathematics (e. g. of Whitehead) (pp. 15-19). The Problem of Evil must be solved on the personal-spiritual level, because I) only persons can appreciate process and the place of evil in process; 2) only persons can see the fallacy of the pleasure-principle in an attempted solution of...