Nevertheless, the distinction between Rationalism and Naturalism still obtained. The great Biblical critic Semler , who is one of the principal representatives of the school , was a strong opponent of the latter; in company with Teller and others he endeavoured to show that the records of the Bible have no more than a local and temporary character, thus attempting to safeguard the deeper revelation, while sacrificing to the critics its superficial vehicle.
He makes the distinction between theology and religion by which he signifies ethics. The distinction made between natural and revealed religion necessitated a closer definition of the latter. For Supernaturalists and Rationalists alike religion was held to be "a way of knowing and worshipping the Deity", but consisting chiefly, for the Rationalists, in the observance of God's law.
The earlier orthodox Protestant view of religion as a body of truths published and taught by God to man in revelation was in process of disintegration.
In Semler's distinction between religion ethics on the one hand and theology on the other, with Herder's similar separation of religion from theological opinions and religious usages, the cause of the Christian religion , as they conceived it, seemed to be put beyond the reach of the shock of criticism, which, by destroying the foundations upon which it claimed to rest, had gone so far to discredit the older form of Lutheranism.
Kant's criticism of the reason, however, formed a turning-point in the development of Rationalism. As far as concerns the point that occupies us at present, Kant was a Rationalist.
For him religion was coextensive, with natural, though not utilitarian , morals. When he met with the criticisms of Hume and undertook his famous "Kritik", his preoccupation was to safeguard his religious opinions, his rigorous morality, from the danger of criticism. This he did, not by means of the old Rationalism, but by throwing discredit upon metaphysics.
The accepted proofs of the existence of God , immortality , and liberty were thus, in his opinion, overthrown, and the well-known set of postulates of the "categoric imperative" put forward in their place. This, obviously, was the end of Rationalism in its earlier form, in which the fundamental truths of religion were set out as demonstrable by reason.
But, despite the shifting of the burden of religion from the pure to the practical reason, Kant himself never seems to have reached the view --; to which all his work pointed --; that religion is not mere ethics, "conceiving moral laws as divine commands", no matter how far removed from Utilitarianism --; not an affair of the mind, but of the heart and will; and that revelation does not reach man by way of an exterior promulgation , but consists in a personal adaptation towards God.
Here the older distinction between natural and revealed religion disappears. There is no special revelation in the older Protestant the Catholic sense, but merely this attitude of dependence brought into being in the individual by the teaching of various great personalities who, from time to time, have manifested an extraordinary sense of the religious. Schleiermacher was a contemporary of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel , whose philosophical speculations had influence, with his own, in ultimately subverting Rationalism as here dealt with.
The majority of modern Protestant theologians accept his views, not, however, to the exclusion of knowledge as a basis of religion. Parallel with the development of the philosophical and theological views as to the nature of religion and the worth of revelation, which provided it with its critical principles, took place an exegetical evolution. The first phase consisted in replacing the orthodox Protestant doctrine i.
This distinction led inevitably to the destruction, of the rigid view of inspiration, and prepared the ground for the second phase. The principle of accommodation was now employed to explain the difficulties raised by the Scripture records of miraculous events and demoniacal manifestations Senf, Vogel , and arbitrary methods of exegesis were also used to the same end Paulus, Eichhorn.
In the third phase Rationalists had reached the point of allowing the possibility of mistakes having been made by Christ and the Apostles, at any rate with regard to non-essential parts of religion. All the devices of exegesis were employed vainly; and, in the end, Rationalists found themselves forced to admit that the authors of the New Testament must have written from a point of view different from that which a modern theologian would adopt Henke, Wegseheider.
This principle, which is sufficiently elastic to admit of usage by nearly every variety of opinion, was admitted by several of the Supernaturalists Reinhard, Storr , and is very generally accepted by modern Protestant divines, in the rejection of verbal inspiration. II Rationalism, in the broader, popular meaning of the term, is used to designate any mode of thought in which human reason holds the place of supreme criterion of truth ; in this sense, it is especially applied to such modes of thought as contrasted with faith.
As such, the rationalistic tendency has always existed in philosophy , and has generally shown itself powerful in all the critical schools. As has been noted in the preceding paragraph, German Rationalism had strong affinities with English Deism and French Materialism , two historic forms in which the tendency has manifested itself.
But with the vulgarization of the ideas contained in the various systems that composed these movements, Rationalism has degenerated. It has become connected in the popular mind with the shallow and misleading philosophy frequently put forward in the name of science , so that a double confusion has arisen, in which; questionable philosophical speculations are taken for scientific facts, and science is falsely supposed to be in opposition to religion.
This Rationalism is now rather a spirit, or attitude, ready to seize upon any arguments, from any source and of any or no value, to urge against the doctrines and practices of faith.
Beside this crude and popular form it has taken, for which the publication of cheap reprints and a vigorous propaganda are mainly responsible, there runs the deeper and more thoughtful current of critical-philosophical Rationalism, which either rejects religion and revelation altogether or treats them in much the same manner as did the Germans. Its various manifestations have little in common in method or content, save the general appeal to reason as supreme.
No better description of the position can be given than the statements of the objects of the Rationalist Press Association. Among these are: "To stimulate the habits of reflection and inquiry and the free exercise of individual intellect. A perusal of the publications of the same will show in what sense this representative body interprets the above statement. It may be said finally, that Rationalism is the direct and logical outcome of the principles of Protestantism ; and that the intermediary form, in which assent is given to revealed truth as possessing the imprimatur of reason, is only a phase in the evolution of ideas towards general disbelief.
Official condemnations of the various forms of Rationalism, absolute and mitigated, are to be found in the Syllabus of Pius IX. All forms of theological statement, however, and pre-eminently the dialectical form of Catholic theology , are rationalistic in the truest sense. Indeed, the claim of such Rationalism as is dealt with above is directly met by the counter claim of the Church : that it is at best but a mutilated and unreasonable Rationalism, not worthy of the name, while that of the Church is rationally complete, and integrated, moreover, with super-rational truth.
Herbert was reacting to the ongoing religious strife and bloodletting that had wracked Europe since the onset of the Reformation in the previous century and would shortly spark a revolution and civil war in England itself resulting in the trial and execution of King Charles I.
Deism, Herbert hoped, would quell this strife by offering a rational and universal creed. Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Herbert established the existence of God from the so-called cosmological argument that, since everything has a cause, God must be acknowledged as the first cause of the universe itself. Given the existence of God, it is our duty to worship him, repent our failings, strive to be virtuous, and expect punishment and reward in the afterlife.
Because this creed was based on reason which was shared by all men unlike revelation , Herbert hoped it would be acceptable to everyone regardless of their religious background. Indeed, he considered deism the essential core religious belief of all men throughout history, including Jews, Muslims, and even Pagans. But in the years from to , the very height of the Enlightenment in England, deism became a major source of controversy and discussion in English religious and speculative culture.
In so doing, they sparked theological disputes that spread across the channel and the Atlantic. These Enlightened deists capitalized on two critical developments in the late 17th century to bolster the case for the religion of nature. The first was a transformation in the understanding of nature itself. The path breaking work of physicists like Galileo, Kepler, and, especially, Newton resulted in a vision of the world that was remarkably orderly and precise in its adherence to universal mathematical laws.
The Newtonian universe was often compared to a clock because of the regularity of its mechanical operations. Deists seized on this image to formulate the argument from design, namely that the clockwork order of the universe implied an intelligent designer, i.
God the cosmic clockmaker. Having denied the existence of innate ideas, Locke insisted that the only judge of truth was sense experience aided by reason. Although Locke himself believed that the Christian revelation and the accounts of miracles contained therein passed this standard, his close friend and disciple Anthony Collins did not.
The Bible was a merely human text and its doctrines must be judged by reason. Since miracles and prophecies are by their nature violations of the laws of nature, laws whose regularity and universality were confirmed by Newtonian mechanics, they cannot be credited. Providential intervention in human history similarly interfered with the clocklike workings of the universe and impiously implied the shoddy workmanship of the original design.
Unlike the God of Scripture, the deist God was remarkably distant; after designing his clock, he simply wound it up and let it run. At the same time, his benevolence was evidenced by the astounding precision and beauty of his workmanship.
Indeed, part of the attraction of deism lay in its foisting a sort of cosmic optimism. True deist piety was moral behavior in keeping with the Golden Rule of benevolence. Tindal insisted that he was a Christian deist, as did Thomas Chubb who revered Christ as a divine moral teacher but held that reason, not faith, was the final arbiter of religious belief. How seriously to take these claims has been a matter of intense and prolonged debate. Deism was proscribed by law after all; the Toleration Act of had specifically excluded all forms of anti- trinitarianism as well as Catholicism.
When Thomas Woolston attacked the scriptural accounts of miracles and the doctrine of the resurrection, he was fined one hundred pounds sterling and sentenced to one year in prison. Certainly, some deists adopted a materialistic determinism that smacked of atheism.
Others, like Collins, Bolingbroke, and Chubb, questioned the immortality of the soul. The Dudleian lecture , endowed by Paul Dudley in , is the oldest endowed lecture at Harvard University. Dudley specified that the lecture should be given once a year, and that the topics of the lectures should rotate among four themes: natural religion, revealed religion, the Romish church, and the validity of the ordination of ministers.
The first lecture was given in , and it continues to the present day. On the other hand, the rational theology of the deists had been an intrinsic part of Christian thought since Thomas Aquinas , and the argument from design was trumpeted from Anglophone Protestant pulpits of most denominations on both sides of the Atlantic.
In fact, Harvard instituted a regular series of lectures on natural religion in Even anti-clericalism had a fine pedigree among dissenting English Protestants since the Reformation. And it is not inconceivable that many deists might have seen themselves as the culmination of the Reformation process, practicing the priesthood of all believers by subjecting all authority, even that of scripture, to the faculty of reason that God had given humanity. Like their English counterparts, most colonial deists downplayed their distance from their orthodox neighbors.
Confined to a small number of educated and generally wealthy elites, colonial deism was a largely private affair that sought to fly below the radar. Benjamin Franklin had been much taken with deist doctrines in his youth and had even published a treatise [ A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain ] in England on determinism with strong atheistic overtones.
But Franklin quickly repented of his action and tried to suppress the distribution of his publication, considering it one of the greatest errors of his youth. Like his handful of fellow colonial deists, Franklin kept a low theological profile.
As a result, deism had very little impact in early America up through the American Revolution. In the years after independence, however, that began to change. Allen had drafted much of the work some twenty years earlier with Thomas Young, a fellow New England patriot and freethinker. Allen rejected revelation scriptural or otherwise , prophecies, miracles, and divine providence as well as such specifically Christian doctrines as the trinity, original sin, and the need for atonement.
The legendary author of Common Sense brought the same militancy and rhetorical flair to the struggle for deism that he had for independence. Paine lambasted the superstitions of Christianity and vilified the priestcraft that supported it. More than simply irrational, Christianity was the last great obstacle to the coming secular chiliad , the Age of Reason. Only when it was vanquished could human happiness and perfectibility be achieved.
A former Baptist minister, Palmer traveled along the Atlantic seaboard lecturing audiences large and small about the truths of natural religion as well as the absurdities of revealed Christianity and the clerical priestcraft that supported them. A skilled biblical casuist , Palmer exposed the irrationality of Christianity and its debased moral principles in Principles of Nature A radical feminist and abolitionist, Palmer found the scriptures filled with an ethical code of intolerance and vengeful cruelty in sharp contrast to the benevolent humanitarianism of his own rational creed.
Palmer spread the word in two deist newspapers he edited, The Temple of Reason — and The Prospect — By the time he died in , Palmer had founded deist societies in several cities including New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In fact, the militant deism of Paine and Palmer never really threatened mainstream Protestantism in the early Republic.
But that was not the way many orthodox divines saw it. After explaining the nature of deism, you are in a wonderful position to enrich your students understanding of the role of religion in the founding of the United States.
The first thing to do is to show the inadequacy of the polemical formulas stated at the outset of this essay. Begin with the secularist case for a deist founding. First note that of those men who signed the Declaration of Independence, sat in the Confederation Congress, or participated in the Constitutional Convention for whom we have reliable information, the vast bulk were fairly traditional in the religious lives.
At least two of these names can be struck off the list immediately. Freemasonry The teachings and practices of the secret fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons, the largest worldwide secret society. Spread by the advance of the British Empire, Freemasonry remains most popular in the British Isles and in other countries originally within the empire.
Freemasonry evolved from the guilds of stonemasons and cathedral builders of the Middle Ages. With the decline of cathedral building, some lodges of operative working masons began to accept honorary members to bolster their declining membership.
From a few of these lodges developed modern symbolic or speculative Freemasonry, which particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, adopted the rites and trappings of ancient religious orders and of chivalric brotherhoods. In the first Grand Lodge, an association of lodges, was founded in England. Freemasonry has, almost from its inception, encountered considerable opposition from organized religion, especially from the Roman Catholic Church, and from various states.
Though often mistaken for such, Freemasonry is not a Christian institution. Freemasonry contains many of the elements of a religion; its teachings enjoin morality, charity, and obedience to the law of the land. For admission the applicant is required to be an adult male believing in the existence of a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul.
0コメント