From Christ-Centered Faith to Enlightenment Principles

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In the last lecture, we were looking at the Puritan effort in New England to hasten the coming of Christ, to follow Christ carefully according to his Word. In the meantime, back in Europe, there were very different views emerging as to what it would mean to be a Christian, and how one ought to try to pursue Christianity. [00:00:10]

Christianity is, in the first place, not about principles, it's about a person. And when you move away from the person to principles, you're probably betraying the faith. Anyway, in 1695, for example, the great political thinker, John Locke, wrote a work entitled, "The Reasonableness of Christianity." [00:01:38]

And there he was basically arguing that the really important part of Christianity is the part we can learn by reason without revelation, that we don't really need revelation, we don't really need the Bible, but Christianity in its principles is so humane, and so reasonable, that we can come to those principles largely on our own. [00:02:40]

And what we see happening here is a movement away from biblical religion in the direction of a kind of humanism, a kind of appeal to humanity, and increasingly moving towards the notion that man is the measure of all things. That it's human beings, without revelation from God, who can arrive at the fundamental ethics that need to bind us all together. [00:03:08]

And, again, in the Enlightenment, there were varying attitudes towards Christianity. Some in the Enlightenment would still call themselves "Christians;" would still say that Christianity is useful or even important. But increasingly, amongst leaders of the Enlightenment, particularly in France, there was a more and more radical notion that really Christianity is a negative in the modern world. [00:04:04]

Carl Becker wrote, published a series of lectures he had given at Yale under the title, "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers." And it's just a little book, very readable, very interesting, very controversial back then and still today, but Becker wanted to argue that really what was happening in the Enlightenment was fundamental Christian ideas simply being secularized. [00:06:31]

They renounced the authority of church and Bible, but exhibited a naive faith in the authority of nature and reason. They scorn metaphysics, but were proud to be called 'philosophers.' They dismantled heaven, somewhat prematurely it seems, since they retain their faith in the immortality of the soul. [00:08:53]

They denied that miracles ever happened, but believed in the perfectibility of the human race. We feel that these philosophers were at once too credulous and too skeptical, they were victims of common sense. In spite of their rationalism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their aversion to hocus pocus and enthusiasm and dim perspectives, in spite of their eager skepticism, their engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies, and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of the last priest, in spite of it all, there is more Christian philosophy in the writing of the philosophe than has yet been dreamt of in our histories. [00:09:30]

The essential articles of the religion of the Enlightenment may be stated thus, (1): Man is not natively depraved. So here is an assault on an essential Christian teaching. (2): The end of life is life itself, the good life on earth, instead of the beatific life after death. (3): Man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth. [00:13:06]

What keeps us back from the perfect life on earth? Not ourselves. Not our natures. Certainly not our sinfulness. What keeps us back is superstitious churches and oppressive governments. Now, in that creed, don't you see, sort of, the agenda that is going to guide a great deal of nineteenth and twentieth century thinking. [00:14:00]

And it led them to try to compromise in various ways, so that, as early as 1662 in New England, they were so concerned about church membership that they came up with an idea called "the Halfway Covenant." And the Halfway Covenant came out of this problem, by 1662 there were numbers of young people who had come to maturity, who had gotten married, but had not yet joined the church, and they were beginning to have children, and they wanted to have those children baptized, but they weren't church members. [00:18:11]

So now that the doctrine of baptism has been compromised, by allowing baptized members to present their children for baptism, and now the Lord's Supper is being compromised, all in the interest of trying to keep the whole society in the church, and desperate to find a way to encourage true religion. So we have all of these efforts, you see, creative efforts, one might say "revolutionary efforts," to find a Christianity that's going to work in an increasingly New World. [00:20:47]

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