The Age of Science and Secularization:

The Land the Enlightenment built

It is somewhat ironic that Calvin and Copernicus (1473 – 1543)

were near contemporaries. Protestantism began just as a scientific revolution, that many scholars maintain had significant medieval antecedents, was about to produce a new view of the world. For more intellectual Christians, this change in world view was a crisis. Over the course of centuries, Christianity had adopted more or less in toto the classical view of the world that placed the earth at the center of a series of concentric spheres that reached up to the moon and sun and beyond to the fixed stars and the highest heavens. In that sense, God really was “up there” and heaven was a locatable place in the universe or just beyond it. It was relatively simple for God to reach down and for humans to reach up. The new scientific world as it developed from Copernicus through Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630),and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) to Isaac Newton (1643-1727) had no such place for God or any apparent finite boundaries. Seldom has so much changed while everything remained in place.

At the heart of the new science was a method of investigation that, despite some significantly loose ends, had its own logic. In many ways, theapologists for this new method were the very different Rene Descartes (1596 –1650)

and Isaac Newton. Descartes’ system of thought rested on his own appreciation for mathematics. In studying the world, he had discovered that any geometric shape could be expressed in terms of an equation that would draw that shape or reproduce it on a sheet of marked draft paper. Most importantly, this mathematical genius proved that you could use graphs to solve complex equations of the first, second, and third degrees. The resultant solutions worked for nature as well as the mind. Descartes’s confidence in Reason—by which he meant something akin to mathematical imagination--was almost unlimited. In his discourse on method (1637), Descartes argued that humankind should doubt whatever could be doubted. Finally, they would come to two truths: their own existence and god’s existence. From these, in principal, all truth could be derived.

Isaac Newton had less confidence in unaided reason than Descartes. In general, English thinking from the medieval period onward had tended towards various kinds of empiricism or philosophical trust in the sensate experience of nature. What Newton did was to argue that empiricism should and could be interpreted by mathematics. It was a bold leap and one that Newton justified by his formulation of the laws of gravity, by his reinterpretation of motion and acceleration, and by his studies of optics.

Although both Newton and Descartes were theists, their methods told people to trust in themselves and their own conclusions. In effect, both set forth extremely persuasive system of knowing that did not need either revelation or authority to establish their truth. If one had the time and ability, one could verify any statement of the new science for one’s self.

At the same time, many intellectuals were deeply troubled by the violence and warfare that had come to characterize European life. If many sensitive souls were willing to die for their faith, those same souls often had serious questions about killing for it. The spectacle of so many people killed over issues that most intellectuals found less certain than most theologians led many to move away from faith or to move to forms of faith that were far more doubtful than either Catholicism or Protestantism encouraged.

Warfare also had its ironic side. Wars often increase the power of the central authorities, and the religious wars were no exception. However, as this occurred, states tended to become more secular, more this worldly. For one thing, they found themselves ruling over peoples of different faiths and they needed all their populations to continue the struggle.

John Locke (1632-1704) the philosopher/theologian who set many of these ideas into a popular (at least among the better educated) form that spread throughout the middle classes.

Locke was a physician whose primary concern was political.

Leader in the Glorious Revolution which replaced James II with William

And Mary

In his essay on Human Understanding (1689).He wanted to demonstrate that humankind was essentially one. Hence, his epistemology stressed the way in which all were born ignorant and learned from experience. The idea of Tabula rasa or Blank slate. Nobles were not biological or mentally better: only more fortunately born.

One of his most influential works was Religion within the Boundaries of

Reason alone (1695)

Deeply influenced by the latitudinarian party, especially, Archbishop

William Tillotson

The latitudinarians wanted to allow as much breadth as possible in the

English church; hence, they tended to see Reason and experience

as more important than formal creeds.

For Locke, the core of religion was natural religion or those religious

Truths that he believed were shared by everyone or, at least,

everyone who thought seriously about the matter. In many

ways, Christ only republished this truth.

Locke’s three religious truths:

Assertions contrary to reason: no one could believe these

Assertions proved by reason: everyone should believe these

Assertions in harmony with or not contradictory to reason: one

May believe these and should if there is evidence

Jesus is primarily a teacher whose words are confirmed by prophecy and

by miracles.

Miracles are very rare and are primarily intended as aids to

epistemology

Locke’s philosophy was neither profound nor particularly acute: however,

it was understandable. Equally important was its inherent instability:

when other thinkers read Locke, he inspired them to go in other

directions. Some thinkers are known for the quality of their disciples;

others are known for the number and quality of their dissenters.

Hence, one branch of Locke went toward a new orthodox

Another went toward radical skepticism about Christian

Claims

Deism:

Deism has often been described in terms of a watch-maker God who made the

world and then left it to run more or less by itself.

In some ways, this is not a fair description. The 18^th century deists were basically

religious liberals with some significant questions and conclusions:

They were non-Trinitarian in their theology and Christology

In general, they were opposed to the concept of miracle

Often they engaged in biblical criticism. Reimarus (1694-1768), whom Schweitzer created with beginning the Quest for the Historical Jesus,

was a noted deist

The deists were often connected with other radical movements. In

many cases, they favored some sort of democracy

The Masons were somewhat related to the early deist. AT a minimum,

Rational supernaturalists (founded in 1717)

Many of the revoluntaries in America were influenced by Deism and

Some, such as Thomas Jefferson, were deists

One problem with language. In the eighteenth century, the world deist

Was roughly equivalent to our word, Theist.

First noted Deist: Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1568-1648)

De veritate (1624) and de religione gentilium (pubished in 1663 after his death)

Five basic teachings of reason:

The existence of God

The obligation to worship God

The ethical nature of worship

The need for repentance

Rewards and punishments in the hereafter

All revelation must conform to these teachings

John Toland (1670-1722). Perhaps first person to be called a “freethinker”

Radical Republican and biographer or editor of Milton, Algernon Sidney, and James Harrington. All were favorite authors in America

Christianity not mysterious, 1696. Burned by the hangman in Dublin.

The only real revelation is the human discovery of truth

Anthony Collins (1679-1729)

Discourse of Freethinking

(against the argument from prophecy)

argued that matter can think against Anglican orthodoxy

Matthew Tindal (1657-1733)

Christianity as Old as Creation 1730. Best known Deist work

Translated into German

Some Antideistic Writers

William Law: (1686-1768)

Non juror who refused the oath to the House of Hanover

A Serious Call To a Devout and Holy Life (1728)

Book said to be dangerous to seminarians.

Suggests that there is no way to be half a Christian

Dr. Samuel Johnson said: "I became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not think much against it; and this lasted until I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law's Serious Call, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion after I became capable of rational inquiry." http://www.passtheword.org/William-Law/wl-intro.htm

This was one of the books that changed my own life. When I read it in college as part of my Inter Varsity Group, I realized that we were play acting at being Christians.

The Case of Reason against M. Tindal (1732) in which he maintained that

God was above ordinary experience

Religion was more than reason

God established what was good; what we believe to be good may not be

What is natural to an animal is what an animal does. In that sense,

actual belief is as natural as deism.

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

Active bishop and philanthropist and physicist

All that exists is in our minds which know only the impressions that

Has made

Philosophical well-argued although many people have not understood

His point that esse is percepi

The world in a real sense exists only in the mind of God who continually

brings the world into being.

Ronald Knox:

‘There was a young man who said "God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad."

"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the Quad

And that's why this tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

Joseph Butler (1692-d. 1752)

The Analogy of Reason (1736)

Popular refutation of the Deists

One of the sources of C. S. Lewis arguments

Begins by arguing that God exists, something everyone in the debate

Accepted

Hence, God is the author of nature

But nature is not as regular as the deists suppose

The same arguments are pro and con revelation

Hence, the question is which is more probable

Miracles and prophecy add to the probability of faith

Many things in nature are similar to things spoken of in revelation

More Influential Enlightenment Voices

Thomas Paine (1739-1809)

Came to America to support the revolution

Noted for his pamphlet Common Sense

The Rights of Man (1791)

Age of Reason (1795). Most notorious book in early American religious

History

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Penname of Francois Marie Arouet

Made English science popular in France

Most popular writer of his day. Clean, classical style, similar to that of

Samuel Johnson in English

The man of wit

Began outraged at the execution of a Protestant and the giving of his child

To a community of religious to raise

Wrote the History of Louis XIV: saw persecution as the great curse on

Louis reign as the Sun King

Candide and the Lisbon Earthquake

Argued that history was the story of human adjustment to the world

and to the growth of knowledge

David Hume: (1711-1776)

Against both faith and deism

Bit of a philosophic imp

Author of a Tory History of England

One of the few religious liberals not to embrace political radicalism

Came to doubt casuality as a real category. We see cause as a mental

habit

We cannot believe in miracles since, by definition., all we believe is what

We have experienced and we have not experienced miracles

Argued that there was no primitive monotheism as some deists thought

Rather polytheism proceded monotheism

There is no permanent I behind my experiences; hence, immortality is not

possible

Edward Gibbon (1737-1737)

One of the creators of modern historiography

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Natural explanation for the spread of Christianity.

Saw Christianity as not necessarily a helpful force in history

A popular bore: William Paley (1743-1805)

Opposed the slave Trade

The Evidences for Christianity 1794. Similar views in Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature

The argument from nature

If you find a watch, you assume that there is a watchmaker

The purpose of revelation is to warn of future rewards and punishments

Required at most American colleges until late in the 19^th cnetury

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Often seen as the first Romanic

The idea of the common will

The belief in education; Emile

The Unitarians: no convenient place to put them in this story

In many ways, rationalists who wanted to continue religious practice

In New England, many Unitarians were Arians at first, although most

Abandoned this position early in the movement’s history

Very unstable theologically: by 1836 were under attack from within.

Immanuel Kant: (1724-1804)

A good person to end the century or begin the next

Aware of the logical problems of empiricism and of its opposites

What is Enlightenment?

The critique of Pure Reason

For Kant, all knowledge is synthetic. We bring reason to the world

And our reason shapes the world

Hence, there is no way to know things beyond or behind reason

We will never know things as they are in themselves

God cannot be proven: all traditional proofs are weak.

Religion is primarily a matter of what we need to believe in order

To make morality possible.

The idea of practical reason; the postulates

Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone

We need the symbol of Christ to reconcile ourselves to

Our duty after inevitable moral failure

Enlightenment as fact and symbol:

In many ways, scholars have seen the enlightenment as the decisive move toward a society that was based on science and its products. Such societies are fluid, open to minorities, based on more evidently rational categories, and tend to base social life on covenantly or constitutional mandates. The US was the first state to write the Enlightenment into its basic laws, although it did not necessarily become an enlightenment culture until after the 1960s.

In much theological literature, however, the enlightenment also appears as a symbol for many of those aspects of modernity that have served to marginalize Christianity in the modern world. There is little doubt that to some extent the Enlightenment marked a new chapter in the way that Christianity would relate to the larger culture.

Notable Events in the Eighteenth Century:

Religion Assumes a New Form: The United States

The Establishment of the British Colonies

The Puritans

The ideal of holy commonwealths

The fraud of the moving of the charter

Visible saints and the idea of conversion

Semi-independence from England

Congregational and local self-government

The “Old Deceiver Law” and the establishment of Harvard and, later, Yale.

Battles over the nature of these holy commonwealths

Roger Williams. (1603-1683/84)

The Native Americans, the Land, and Religious Freedom

The establishment of Rhode Island

The flourishing of this zone of freedom

The paradox of slavery at Newport

Mistress Ann Hutchinson (1593-1643)

Tried for the heresy of believing in private revelation

Explusion to Rhode Island

The Witches at Salem

1692—just as enlightenment was ending this in Europe

Missions to the Native Americans

The Southern Colonies.

The ideal of a transplanted establishment

Virginia was divided into parishes

the system was stressed by distance

Clergy often found themselves without guidance or discipline

The vestries often refused to give clergy their stipends or their tenure (contracts for less than a year).

Remained loyal to the Stuarts in the English Civil War—hence, the popularity of the Cavaliers and the destination of the “Old Dominion.”

Religious Liberty fails in Maryland

The colony was owned by Lord Baltimore 1605-1675)

he attempted to establish a Catholic overclass and a protestant servant class

violent interaction between the settlers

Church of England established after the Glorious Revolution as a compromise.

The Pennsylvania experiment in Religious Liberty

William Penn

The American Great Awakening:

emphasis on the changed heart

conversion as the normative way into the church

strict morality under lay the movement

Began in New Jersey

Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691-1747)leader

learned pietism in Holland

itinerant preaching

“You have lived twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, some longer, and walked in the way that seems right in your eyes. But now you are nearer to eternity, and God is warning you not to proceed any further in your own ways."

William Tennent, Sr (1673-1747)

Puritan background

became a Presbyterian in America

Two Presbyterian parties a

New England party

a scotch Irish party

Old Sides excluded the revivalists in 1742

inspired by Whitefield

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Northhampton

revival of the 1730s

1739: the revival begins again

the extremes

James Davenport

Charles Chauncey

leading opponent of revivals

Samuel Davies in Virginia

Early American Methodist

Philip Embury (1773)

Robert Strawbridge (1781)

Thomas Webb

Francis Asbury (1746-1816)

Wesley designated him as a leader before the Revolution. One of the few to remain after the War

First Methodist Bishop

Edwards as Theologian

graduated from Yale in 1720

associate Pastor in Northampton with Solomon Stoddard his grandfather

student of Locke and Newton

1746: A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections

dispute over the requirements for membership led to his dismissal

worked with the Indians at Stockbridge

The Nature of True Virtue

The Edwardseans

Hopkins

Bellamy

Emmons

The American Revolution:

religious freedom very important contribution to Christian history

originally achieved state by state

last states to let go of establishments: Massachusett and Connecticut

greatest battle: Virginia: “The Statue for Religious Freedom”

the Constitution: No religious test for office

First Amendment

New Forms of Religious Organization

American Episcopal Church

Name came at a Convention in Maryland in 1780

William White (1747-1836) of Philadelphia designed the new denomination

First General Convention held in 1785

Connecticut sent its own candidate for bishop

, Samuel Seabury (b. 1729-1796),abroad to be consecrated. Unable to secure that favor from Parliament, he was consecrated by non-jurors

White and Samuel Provoost (1741-1805), elected by the Philadelphia convention were able to be consecrated in England

the three bishops had to combine to consecrate a third

American Methodism:

Wesley finally was forced to ordain for America

Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey ordained

Coke and Asbury were designated as superintendents

Dec. 24, 1784: The Christmas Conference

ordained Asbury

prepared an American discipline

soon Asbury was calling himself bishop

Catholics

end of the penal laws in most states

1784: John Carroll (1735-1815)

becomes the American prefect apostolic and in 1790 the first bishop of Baltimore

in 1808: Baltimore became the site of an archbishopric

Presbyterians

added a national assembly

Universalists

John Murray 1741–1815

Whitefield convert

Came to Massachusetts where he served at Gloucester and

Boston

Present at first Universalist conference in 1784 at Oxford Mass.

Christ had died for all; hence, all would be saved

Elhanan Winchester (September 30, 1751-April 18, 1797)

Pastor in Philadelphia.

Originally, Baptist. Very Anti-slavery.

1781 adopted Unversalist Principles

The Universal Restoration, Exhibited in Four Dialogues between a Minister and His Friend, 1788

salvation is based on the free submission of all to God

but that need not happen in this life

period of purification ahead Almost a purgatory

arranged the ordination of Hosea Bellou