The Religious Enlightenment

Well, I'm now two weeks into my first doctoral seminar, and I'm very happy with the course and with the trajectory of my PhD program.  My seminar is called The Church in Modern Society and is exploring the influence of the Enlightenment and secularization on the development of theology and the church (mostly in England and America) from the 17th through the 20th centuries.  It really is a fascinating and important topic to explore and understand.

One of the questions that we've been looking at these first two weeks is the notion that the Enlightenment and Christianity were historically over and against each other.  I know I at least remember learning that with the advance of reason in the Enlightenment, the church was put on the defensive and faith was characterized as struggling to hold out against the mighty forces of science and reason.  In some ways, this has been true in modern history; but in many ways this is certainly not the case.

Take John Locke, for example (no, not the John Locke from the TV show 'Lost,' but the philosopher-scientist John Locke from 17th c. England).  He has been widely looked to as one of the fathers of the science of reason and logic, and has therefore been understood as being against the Christian faith.  One of the questions we looked at in reading Locke in our seminar, then, was whether based on his writings we could discern if he was an 'orthodox' Christian.

We read his essay/book "The Reasonableness of Christianity."  That's a pretty 'Enlightened' title, isn't it?  In this book, Locke meticulously employs the modern constructs of reason to clearly argue for the truth of Christianity.  And what is the central question of truth for Locke?  It is whether or not Jesus Christ is the Messiah.  Now, Locke might end up straying slightly from some other traditional theological positions, but anyone who combs through the Bible to prove that Jesus is the Christ, and that to be a Christian means living in faith and obedience to Jesus, is in my mind on the right track.

There are more examples of Enlightened thinkers who actually see and use reason as proof of faith, and not the other way around.  Isaac Newton, for one, discovers and articulates an entirely new worldview using physics, and then offers the order of the cosmos as clear evidence of God's providence.  Newton then partners with other leading Christians and scientists to promote the Christian faith through reason and science (see the Boyle lectures beginning in 1691).

It can be argued, then, that the Enlightenment should really be called the Religious Enlightenment.  And what's amazing is that just in the last 30 or 40 years, historical scholars have been reassessing their interpretation of the Enlightenment as being embodied in reason against faith.  As we look more and more at the primary sources of Enlightenment ideas and notice that the fathers of the Enlightenment were employing reason with faith to understand biblical Christianity for their time, it becomes clear that this really was a Religious Enlightenment.

Now this is certainly not to say that the Enlightenment was completely religious through and through.  It is at this time, for example, that the deist movement and secularization begin to rise.  But we must be more careful and nuanced in how we understand the development of faith and reason, because how we understand history has (or at least should have) a profound effect on our current worldview and our vision of the future.