15: The Enlightenment - "Excuse me God, you're in my chair"

INTRODUCTION

Today we reach a turning point in our study of church history. There have certainly been a lot of those, but I see this one as different.

For the most part, since the time of Constantine in the 4th Century, Christianity in the West has had unquestioned dominance and been the “glue” holding together society and culture. There have been many disagreements over what Christianity is and what the church should look like and how they should be integrated into life, politics, art, music, etc., but there was never a consensus that Christianity was irrelevant and should be, if not purged from the culture, relegated to second or third-class status below other disciplines and world-views.

However, with the Enlightenment, that changes. Nancy Pearcy says the Enlightenment saw the first generation of “self-consciously anti-Christian scholars.”[i] We are roughly in the period beginning in 1750 and covering about the next 100 years – the Enlightenment being on the front-end of that time period.

It’s at this point that religion in general and Christianity in particular begins to be “ghettoized.”

It’s also at this point that we enter a cultural landscape to which we can better relate since our culture is a child of the Enlightenment and other more strident anti-Christian movements that came later.

So, what was the Enlightenment?

It’s a bit hard to nail down. The term “Enlightenment” was coined in the late nineteenth century. So, just as with “Middle Ages” it was those looking back on the time who named it. At its most basic level, enlightenment thinking elevated human reason to the level of being able to explain everything. Alister McGrath says: “an emphasis upon the ability of human reason to penetrate the mysteries of the world is rightly regarded as a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment.”[ii]

Another way to put it:

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that stressed

i. Reason as the way to truth

ii. A world based on perfectly ordered natural laws

iii. Self-confident and optimistic belief in human ability to make progress.

We’ve heard something like that before (as regards elevating human reason) does anyone remember who that was?

That was one of the characteristics of Thomas Aquinas’ theology that was based on an Aristotelian view of the universe rather than the Platonic view that had prevailed until then. Aquinas, however, did not suggest that human reason superseded or was a substitute for divine revelation – something that we’ll see to be the case with the Enlightenment.

As you can imagine, this line of thinking challenged the teachings of the church.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

It was primarily Christianity and specifically protestant Christianity who were the subjects of Enlightenment criticisms and the most impacted by Enlightenment ideas.

McGrath lists three reasons that is so:

1. Protestantism was at its strongest in those areas of Europe where the influence of the Enlightenment was greatest

2. Protestant university and seminary teachers enjoyed a greater degree of academic freedom than their Roman Catholic counterparts.

3. Protestantism enjoyed especially close links with many northern European universities, with the results that shifts in the academic culture were felt particularly strongly in Protestant faculties of theology.

So, for these reasons any account of the influence of the Enlightenment on theology will focus on Protestant theology.[iii]

The Enlightenment critique of Christianity was based on the principle of the omnicompetence of human reason.[iv] Again, this is different from Aquinas who saw human reason as capable of discerning some things but certainly not everything. Sam Storms says of the Enlightenment, “The status and capabilities of man were elevated, placing him, rather than God, center stage… The arbiter of truth is no longer an external religious authority, whether Scripture or the church, but human reason.” [v]

This was especially true in France where, after the French Revolution in the 1790s, a statue of the “Goddess Reason” was placed in Notre Dame Cathedral symbolizing the belief that reason, not God or the church was the ultimate authority.

But the Enlightenment did not lead to the complete rejection of religion or even Christianity in all cases. What it did do, however, was to subject religious teaching and Christian doctrine to the evaluation of human reason and those things that did not pass muster were rejected.

So which Christian doctrines did not pass muster?

Here are a few according to McGrath:

The Possibility of Miracles

As science began to advance and people like Isaac Newton showed that the universe operated in an orderly predictable, almost mechanical way, the possibility of miracles began to be questioned. In a work called “Essay on Miracles,” philosopher David Hume claimed that we cannot rely on just the biblical accounts of miracles but should be able to observe such things ourselves in our own day. Since we do not / cannot, believing in miracles is not reasonable. “A miracle goes against our very regular and extensive experience of how the world works. Therefore, on the basis of experience, the probability that a miracle has occurred must always be less than the probability that it hasn’t. Because it is rational to believe what is most probable, we never have a good reason to believe that a miracle has occurred.”[vi]

One of the theological belief systems to come out of the Enlightenment was Deism. Deists weren’t quite ready to dispense with God altogether but they believed he created the world, set the natural laws in order then stood back to let everything play out. As such, they reject the authority of divine revelation placing reason in its stead. They also reject supernatural events aka, miracles.

You may be familiar with something commonly called the “Jefferson Bible” but actually titled “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” It was compiled by Thomas Jefferson who (as well as several of our founders) was a deist and so he amended the Gospels with scissors and glue, removing all references to the supernatural – including the resurrection - and leaving only things like the moral teachings of Jesus that he believed could be defended using reason. The last line of Jefferson’s work is: “Now, in the place where He was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed." That’s where the Thomas Jefferson Bible, as well as Enlightenment theology ends.

Which reminds me of Paul’s admonition that if Christ is not raised our faith is in vain (I Corinthians 15:14). A Christianity without a resurrection ceases to be Christianity.

But the thinkers of the Enlightenment were not willing to completely jettison Christianity because they saw value in its moral teachings so they tried to come up with a way to keep the moral teachings but get rid of what they considered the unreasonable stuff about miracles, etc.

The Doctrine of Original Sin

Enlightenment thinkers believed heartily in human potential. Because of advances in science and other learning, they were convinced that human beings were moving onward and upward and, most critically, they believed that progress was due to innate human potential and goodness.

Because of that, they found the doctrine of original sin to be especially offensive. Philosophers such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau felt it encouraged pessimism with regard to human ability thereby impeding social and political development.[vii] Your problem is not a sin nature, you’re problem is that you think you have a sin nature so you should free yourself from that.

What implication does that have for Christianity?

If there is no sin-nature, there is no need for a savior. Enlightenment thinkers saw doctrines such as original sin to be what kept man in bondage, not a sin nature. They wanted to free us from thinking so badly about ourselves. You could say they were the original preachers of self-esteem.

The Problem of Evil

Enlightenment thinkers approached evil differently than their predecessors in the Middle Ages and the Reformation. In those former times, the existence of evil was seen as a theological issue to be addressed but not as evidence that God either did not exist or was not good. In other words, prior to the Enlightenment, there was an assumption that God existed and was good. Things such as natural disasters, therefore, had to be explained within that assumption. However, the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and experience turned that on its head. You don’t start with God but with your experience then work your way to God from that.

For Enlightenment philosophers, the existence of evil was seen as a challenge to the Christian faith, not something to be explained within its boundaries. In other words, it called into question the truth of Christianity.

In 1755 there was a major earthquake and resulting tsunami in Lisbon, Portugal. It is estimated that of a population of some 200,000 people 30,000 – 40,000 were killed and 85% of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed. I happened on November 1, All Saint’s Day, when the churches were filled with worshippers attending mass for the holiday.

This tragedy sparked a discussion across Europe about why things like this happen. It was such a significant event in European philosophical discussion that Will Durant in volume IX of his epic work “The Story of Civilization,” has a section entitled “The Theology of Earthquakes.”

Some, like the Jesuits, said it happened because Lisbon was a wicked city – but weren’t other cities in Europe equally wicked?

Some said it was because Portugal was Roman Catholic but were there not Protestant cities that faced disasters as well?

Rousseau said it was because people had left the simple life God intended of farms and villages and had congregated in big cities that so many people had died.

John Wesley said it was, at its core, the result of sin and the curse.

Voltaire rejected all of these explanations. His most famous work, Candide, was written in response to the various theories on the Lisbon earthquake. Ultimately Voltaire felt the earthquake spoke to God’s indifference and cruelty toward humanity – which if, as Enlightenment scholars taught, man was basically good is a conclusion one could come to, I guess. The elevation of man always results in the diminishing of God. Always.

Jesus, however, addresses the Lisbon earthquake and all other similar disasters in Luke 13:4-5:

“Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The Identity & Significance of Jesus Christ

The core question of humanity ever since it was asked of Peter in Matthew 16:15 is, regarding Jesus Christ, “Who do you say I am?”

The Enlightenment philosophers too had an answer to this question, but it was not Peter’s answer.

Both Deism and the German Enlightenment believed there was a discrepancy between the Jesus of history and the Jesus revealed in the scriptures. They believed that “beneath the supernatural redeemer of mankind lurked a simple human figure, a glorified teacher of common sense.” There began, therefore, a quest for the so-called historical Jesus.

This was summed up in a work by Albert Schweitzer (who by the way, lived several years after the period we’re considering today showing how much these views had taken hold) called “The Quest of the Historical Jesus:”

“(if) we desire to gain an historical understanding of Jesus’ teaching, we must leave behind what we learned in the catechism regarding the metaphysical divine sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought. Only those who carry the teachings of catechism back into the preaching of the Jewish Messiah will arrive at the idea that he was the founder of a new religion. To all unprejudiced persons it is manifest that ‘Jesus has not the slightest intention of doing away with the Jewish religion and putting another in its place.”

What’s the problem with this approach?

There are many but the basic one in my mind is, if you cannot trust what the disciples wrote about Jesus’ actions, how can you trust what they wrote about his teaching? Especially if what they wrote about his actions were lies meant to further their personal agenda (which is what’s claimed by many in this camp).

Obviously, this line of thinking caused people to reevaluate the purpose of Jesus’ life. According to the miracle and sin-denying men of the Enlightenment, it certainly could not be to die as a substitute for man’s sin, so they had to come up with another theory of the atonement.

What was the meaning of Christ’s death (not death and resurrection, mind you, the latter being impossible)?

“Jesus’ death on the cross was reinterpreted in terms of a supreme moral example of self-giving and dedication, intended to inspire similar dedication and self-giving on the part of his followers…the Enlightenment marginalized his death and denied his resurrection, in order to emphasize the quality of his moral teaching.”[viii]

So again, they want to hang on to the moral teachings of Jesus because they think that is good for society but they want to divorce them from who the Scriptures claim Jesus is.

This essentially makes Christianity no different than any other religion. It’s all about doing good works. You can see then why there’s so much confusion among liberal theologians and other heirs of the Enlightenment when we make exclusive claims about Christianity.

THE CHURCH’S RESPONSE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

As with all cultural shifts, the church responded one of two ways. There were those who embraced (or at least conceded to) the new beliefs and tried to reconcile them with the faith and those who maintained an orthodox position regardless of which way the cultural winds were blowing.

Since our time is short, we’ll just look at an example of each.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834)

Schleiermacher was a reformed pastor in Germany in the early nineteenth century. He was influenced by the Enlightenment notion that biblical accounts of things like miracles were not reasonable and therefore should not be believed. But for Schleiermacher, that was no reason to abandon religion. True religion was not about historical events but about Gefühl, or feeling.

Gefühl, however, is not exactly like our English word “feeling.” It doesn’t mean mere sentimentality but a “profound awareness of the One on whom all existence depends.”[ix]For Schleiermacher, the deep abiding feeling that is the core of Christianity is the belief that we are utterly dependent upon God.

“He believed the function of theology is to explore and expound the implications of that feeling of dependence at three levels, the self, its relations with the world, and its relations with God.”[x]

Anything that is not related to that feeling of dependence is not a fit subject for theology according to Schleiermacher. So, for example, Schleiermacher was say creation is an important theological topic because knowing God is the Creator shows us all that exists depends upon God and so helps reinforce our dependent feeling. But, the actual historical events described in Genesis or later with Moses & the Exodus, etc. are not proper matters for theological discussion because “…the particular pieces of information would never be articles of faith in our sense of the phrase, for our feeling of absolute dependence does not gain thereby either a new content, a new form, or clearer definition.”[xi]

The bottom line for Schleiermacher was that religion was different from knowledge. By making that distinction, he tried to maintain Christian belief without having to worry the things in scripture could be reasonably or scientifically verified.

Timothy Paul Jones says the God of Schleiermacher is more like the Force of Star Wars than the God of Holy Scripture.

Schleiermacher was also influential in the founding of the German higher criticism movement which sought to subject the Bible to the same investigative standards as any other’ work of literature and to come up with what “really happened” in the same way that those searching for the “historical Jesus” did – the two movements really being two sides of the same coin. We can’t trust what’s in the Bible we have to subject it to some kind of filtering process to separate the wheat from the chaff. And that filtering process as we’ve seen is human reason.

Charles Hodge (1797 – 1878)

On the opposite side of both the ocean and theological spectrum was Charles Hodge. Hodge was a professor at Princeton for around fifty years and balanced a fervent commitment to the faith with an active engagement with the intellectual challenges to Christianity. He’s considered the founder of what’s called “Princeton Theology” which took a very strong stand for the inerrancy and inspiration of scripture. You can see why that would be the place to take your stand in this era given it was the truth of scripture that was most under attack.

Hodge wrote a three –volume Systematic Theology defending and expounding upon the faith.

On Jesus as an historical person:

“The Redeemer did not merely live eighteen hundred years ago, and then disappear, to be remembered only as a historical person as any other of the departed; on the contrary He is ever living in the Church” [xii]

Regarding miracles:

“The miracles recorded in the Scriptures are a competent part of the great system of truth therein revealed. The whole stands or falls together.”[xiii]

Why the Enlightenment?

Why did this huge shift in thinking happen?

Two main things:

· A growing confidence in human abilities resulting from scientific advances. Things that seemed mysterious to people in the past were explained as natural phenomena by science. Might that also be true regarding the mysteries of religion?

· Perhaps disillusionment with religion brought on by the turmoil in Europe since the beginning of the reformation. The change brought by the Reformation was not just theological but political as well and had far-reaching consequences for individuals and nations.

However, at its most basic:

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” – John 3:19

John Frame says:

“…the history of philosophy illustrates how human thinkers seek to avoid responsibility to God by claiming autonomy.”

The Enlightenment thinkers believed light came into the world through the rejection of God’s Word whereas the Bible tells us it is the Word that brings light.

[i]The Soul of Science: Christian Faith & Natural Philosophy, Nancy Pearcy, Pp. 45-47 [ii]Historical Theology, Alister E. McGrath, p. 220 [iii]ibid, p.221 [iv]ibid [v] http://www.samstorms.com/all-articles/post/the-enlightenment [vi]Hume on Miracles, Michael Lacewing, p. 1 [vii]McGrath, p. 224 [viii]Ibid, p. 226 [ix]The Story of Christianity, Justo Gonzalez, p. 286 [x]Ibid [xi]The Christian Faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, p. 151 [xii]Hodge, C. (1997). Systematic Theology(Vol. 3, p. 692). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc. [xiii]Ibid, Vol. 1, p. 635