"If the scientists were making less and less place of God in their
systems, the theologians were doing exactly the same thing. The latter
half of the Age of Reason saw the rise and brief intellectual dominance
[I don't believe it was so brief. It's still pretty prevalent today.] of
a curious form of religion, a sort of halfway house between
Christianity and atheism, that sought to base its doctrines upon reason
itself. That religion was deism, and for over half a century it
coexisted in an uneasy tension with orthodox Christianity [Now it has
just infiltrated it...].
The word 'deism' means exactly the same thing as 'theism' -- belief
in God. Until the seventeenth century, the two were used
interchangeably. However, 'deism' then took on quite a distinct meaning,
to refer to the rationalist religion which flourished in the early
eighteenth century, and which first took definitive form in England.
In essence, deism was what happened when people thought of religion
in terms of reason instead of revelation, as Clarke, Leibniz and the
rest were doing -- and then decided that some parts of religion didn't
really meet reason's strict criteria. They therefore dropped these
parts, resulting in a rather stripped-down version of Christianity. In
Europe, one influential theologian who was doing this as early as the
sixteenth century was Faustus Socinus, the Italian founder of European
unitarianism, the rationalist denial of the Trinity. It was not long
before similar ideas were becoming current in England, flourishing in
the hands of iconoclasts such as John Biddle. Indeed, in the late
sixteenth century a number of people were burned at the stake in England
for denying the Trinity or the divinity of Christ. Within a century,
however, it was possible to say such things without any fear of
execution.
The godfather of deism proper, though, was the swashbuckling Edward,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, romantic adventurer, serial lover and literary
dilettante. Cherbury, the elder brother of the poet George Herbert
[Amazing what can happen with two people in the same family. You should
check out George Herbert's
poetry: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/herbbib.htm ], was
born in 1583 in Shropshire. He entered an arranged marriage at the age
of 16 and, as he later claimed, remained faithful to his vows for the
first ten years. He later became a Knight of Bath, and spent many years
wandering Europe as a soldier of fortune and duelist; he later claimed
that a significant proportion of the female aristocracy of Europe kept a
copy of his portrait between their breasts! All this ended in 1619 when
he was made ambassador to France, and he died in 1648 as Baron Herbert
of Cherbury.
Somehow, Herbert found time to write not only poetry and historical
works, but also some surprisingly penetrating philosophy, in which he
attacked the nascent empiricism of Thomas Hobbes and defended the early
version of the doctrine of innate ideas, which influenced both Descartes
and Locke. Herbert talked about 'common notions' which he thought were
shared by all sane people, and highlighted the five in particular, which
he thought made up religion [A lot of people still follow the false
idea that Christianity is only about morality and works. "There's
nothing new under the sun".]:
1. There is a God.
2. He should be worshipped.
3. Morality is central to worship.
4. Sin must be repented of.
5. There is a life after death, involving rewards and punishments.
Herbert believed that, in primitive times, every religion had
consisted of these five notions alone [Clearly he didn't really know
much about other religions]. Throughout history, however, each society
has added its own traditions to this basis, resulting in the diverse
collection of religions we see today. In his On the Gentile Religions,
essentially the first work of comparative religion, Herbert examined
each major religion to try to demonstrate the truth of his theory.
This notion that religions -- and specifically Christianity --
consisted of a common core of universal beliefs, together with the
irrational encrustations of history, was taken up enthusiastically by a
number of thinkers at the end of the seventeenth century. They combined
it with the emerging idea that religion was a matter of reason rather
than revelation.
We can see the transition from orthodox Christianity to deism in John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity of
1695 [Many Christians seem to idolize Locke today...]. Locke did not
share Herbert's belief in 'common notions', a concept that he attacked
powerfully in the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Neither did he agree with Herbert that every society believes in and
worships God; on the contrary, he thought that before Christ the only
people who did so were the Jews and the Greek philosophers, and everyone
else was in barbarous ignorance. Christ thus plays an important role as
teacher of humanity, since after him the notion of one God and our sin
in the face of his goodness has spread across the globe. At the same
time, Lock stresses the need for not only illumination but salvation
through Christ. This, he believes, occurs when believers repent of their
sins and acknowledge Christ as 'Messiah' [Not Son of God, Lord of all
Creation??], and he devotes considerable space demonstrating that this
was the central point of the primitive gospel message. Quite what Locke
understood by 'Messiah' is not very clear; but it does seem that he was,
at least, reluctant to think in terms of a Trinity. He may have been
sympathetic to the unitarian tendencies of people such as Newton and
Clarke -- although Locke was always quick to deny that there was any
kind of anti-trinitarianism in his work. Here, then, we have a rather
stripped down version of Christianity. It is one where there is still a
need for revelation, although it does not seem to have told us much that
was not already known, at least by the Greek philosophers; but it is
also a kind of 'Christianity lite,' playing down the old-fashioned
metaphysics and traditions. This approach is sometimes known as
'Latitudinarianism' -- basically the late seventeenth century's version
of theological liberalism [Yup.]."
- Jonathan Hill [And my own notes/snarky comments inserted]
From:
//www.amazon.com/Faith-Age-Reason-Enlightenment-Histories/dp/0830823603/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375723310&sr=1-2&keywords=faith+in+the+age+of+reason
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