The Essence of the Religion of Reason

Based on our last post, what then is the essence of Religion? What should the Church look like? Livingston outlines four views of what a Religion of Reason should look like. Before we get into the different views, some more ground work must be done. The apostles of religion thought that religion should be a simple matter and should be reduced down to key understandings. Everything that complicated religion should be done away with. With these apostles, "There was a general desire, even among the supernaturalists, to reduce religion and Christianity to a very few doctrines and even fewer practices." (pg. 36) With this premise, "Sacraments and rituals often were regarded as useless, even dangerous distractions" (pg. 36) as they only over-complicated religion and what it required of humanity. The only ritual or sacrament that was worth practicing was morality. In effect there was a view that "religion was solely a matter between the individual and God and therefore a highly individualistic affair." (pg. 36) Due to this, "the Church was thought of as a voluntary association." (Pg. 36)

According to these thinkers that established the Religion of Reason, we did not outside authority or guidance. We only needed ourselves and God and an attitude of 'Jesus and me' developed. My autonomous reason and morality can guide me, so why do I need anything else? This lead to the first of the four views outlined by Livingston.

1. Christianity is a corruption of true religion and needs to be opposed. This view draws on Remairus, Lessing and Voltaire by holding that doctrines are often obscure and unreasonable, thus they get in the way of what religion should be. The perversion of the supernatural distracts us from the natural, so the sickness of Christianity should be gotten rid of in favor of a more natural religious understanding.
2. Christianity is the religion of Nature. This second view plays off the the thought of Toland, Tindal and Kant. "The essence of Christianity is none other than that of the religion of reason, but couched in the more or less imperfect form of an historical tradition." (pg. 36) This view holds that Christian doctrine obscured what nature reveals by adding un-neccesarry and illogical dogma into the mix. Hence it follows that we can get rid of Tradition in all of its forms, as everyone that is reasonable has access to the truth. Tradition then is made superfluous and not needed.
3. Historical Christianity is a supplement to natural religion. According to this view, "Natural religion is excellent and legitimate as far as it goes but...it needs the supplementation of certain supernatural doctrines which are only found in special revelation in Scripture." (pg. 36) These supplements are only valid if they are not contrary to Reason and Experience. Nature can only point us so far, and after we reach the limits of nature, special revelation can take us the rest of the way. (This is reminiscent of the Natural Theology of Emil Brunner) Even though Special Revelation adds to general revelation, it still is subject to general revelation. If Special Revelation does not conform to general revelation, then it is what is specially reveled is not Revelation
4. Christianity is one historic stage in the quest for a perfect religion. This view holds that Christianity is a stepping stone towards true religion and thus is not the true religion. The "Christ or Christianity is not seen as the historic republication of the original religion of nature or as the full and complete revelation of divine truth." (Pg. 36) Christ and Christianity are incomplete, and as history continues to enfold, truth will be added to the truth of Christianity making it complete. Christianity, in Lessing's view, is necessarily incomplete due to the fact that it is historically conditioned. True religion, for Lessing, is found in the 'Eternal Gospel' which "will transcend the inadequate, historically conditioned and obscure truths" (pg. 35) found in Scripture.

Underscoring all four of these views is the understanding that Christianity is no more than a morality brought to  light by Reason. This view, in its various manifestations, although it failed philosophically, is still present in the Church today.

In our next post, we will look at the supposed failure of the religion of Reason. 

The Religion of Reason

As we previous stated, there were criteria for religion in the Enlightenment era. One was that it conforms to our experience and the other that it conforms to reason. It is this second criteria that we will examine now. I will briefly outline the Religion of Reason and then, through Livingstone, point to it's supposed failure.

The Religion of Reason dethroned the traditional Judeo-Christian God and replaced it with Reason. Revelation was not enough to establish knowledge of God and man anymore. Everything that was revealed in the Scriptures and Tradition had to pass the test and fire of Reason. Christian Wolff, a German philosopher, held that there was a particular necessity to belief in a god, yet "Particular revealed doctrines, however, were fair game for dismissal if they were found to be unreasonable." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 29)

These particular doctrines that were rejected included original sin, predestination, vicarious atonement and the eternity of punishment. These doctrines had to be dismissed to get at the "spiritual kernel of the Old and New Testaments." (pg. 29) According to Wolff and the followers of the Religion of Reason, certain doctrines of the Church would not and did not hold up to critical analysis. If it did not seem logically or physically plausible, then it did not and could not have happened. Thus, we cannot base any doctrine on these false stories and events.

H.S. Reimarus took this farther and introduced a tension between the 'Jesus of History' and the 'Christ of Faith'. The implication of this tension is that there was a Jesus that is historically situated, but he is not the Christ of Faith. The Christ of faith is an invention of the disciples, which was "wholly foreign to Jesus' own intentions." (pg. 31) Reimarus stated that "When Jesus calls himself God's Son, he means to imply only that he is the Christ or Messiah particularly loved by God, and thus he does not introduce to the Jews any new doctrine or mystery." (pg 30-31) This means that Jesus was not calling himself God or Divine but just taking on the titles of the Jewish Prophets, and setting himself up as a great moral teacher. However, "the failure of that Messianic mission" to establish a powerful kingdom in Jerusalem, "and Jesus's inglorious death on the Cross shattered the disciples' expectations. Faced with a crisis, the apostles concocted the account of Jesus as the expected Jewish suffering savior who came to redeem humanity from sin and who would be raised on the third day." (pg. 31) What Reimarus is arguing is that the rational understanding of Jesus failed, so the disciples invented an irrational falsehood to save face. Thus, the Church of Jesus was to be only a church of moral reasonableness, instead of a Church of redemptive grace and supernatural salvation.

Remairus' insight backed up the Religion of Morality in this way. Jesus revealed natural and reasonable moral truth and nothing more. The Church, according to the Rational Religionists should have stayed natural and not had anything to do with the supernatural.

G.E Lessing continued this by stating that "The teachings (of Jesus and Scripture) are not authoritative because they are found in a sacred book: the book is sacred because it speaks an inward truth that existed long before the Bible." (pg. 34-35) He backs this up by analogy. "Is the situation such that 'I should hold a geometrical theorem to be true not because it can be demonstrated but because it can be found in Euclid?' No, of course not." (pg. 34) From this we can establish that truth is not truth based on authority or writing, but because they can be demonstrated. Following from this, we can say that truth comes not from the Revelation of the Holy Spirit but from Revelation of the natural order by the Rational mind.

From the thoughts of Remairus and Lessing we can say that the Church should not hold to anything due to special revelation or divine command. Instead, the Church should be based on the observable order of Nature and it's working out in experience.

In our next post, we will discuss then what the followers of the Religion of Reason thought Christianity should be.

The Religion of Morality

The more analytical philosophers of religion would hone in on the first criteria of religious truth that the Enlightenment thinkers held to, I find the second criteria more interesting and more disturbing. Thus, for now I will bypass the first criteria and focus on the second.

The British thinker Matthew Tindal held that Reason was not enough of a standard to hold Religion up to. A purely Reasonable Religion, for Tindal, was missing the point of religion. According to Tindal, "all beliefs and practices must be judged not only by natural reason but by their ability to promote human happiness." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 23) If we were to only judge things on their logical consistency, we would only be left with a mind full of prepositions and ideas, and our lives would not be better. Therefore, we have to not only test the reasonableness of religion, we need to test of how it effects our everyday life and mood.

Tindal's thought continues in this vein: "God's purpose in creation was not for His own glory or advantage, but the happiness of His creatures. God thus demands of us only what will contribute to our perfection and happiness." (pg. 23, italics added) We attain this happiness and perfection through discerning the universal, unchanging truth and putting it into action. Put another way, we become happy by reasoning out morality and putting it into action. "The end of religion, then, is morality, for true religion consists 'in a constant disposition of mind to do all the good we can, and thereby render ourselves acceptable to God in answering the of our creation.'" (pg. 24)


If God's purpose in creation was to make us happy, then our purpose in life is not to make God happy. Our purpose in life is then transformed into a mission to make ourselves happy through the practice of correct action. On top of this, the end of religion is not God, but ourselves. Religion exists solely for our sake. Our morality comes from God, but is not for God.

The French thinker Voltaire took this idea further. Voltaire held that religion should be the practice of morality. His ideal church service would consist of of "primarily...praise and adoration and lessons in morality." (pg. 28) This is what the Church should become according to Voltaire. It should become a place to gather and to be told how to act and behave according to a certain set of moral rules. In doing so, we strip the doctrines and creeds of content that do not hold up to our conception of morality. Tindal held that "Anything in religion that is not required of our moral life should be removed, for the more one 'is not of a moral nature, the less he will be able to attend those that are.'" (pg. 24) According to Livingston, Tindal went so far that he was "willing to call everything in religion superstitious and dangerous which is not directly conductive to morality." (pg. 24)

Not only is this what the Church should become according to Tindal and Voltaire, but it has become this. We, as a Church, have become ignorant of doctrines and their meaning. We have gotten rid of the sacraments and replaced them with moral lessons. When we hear a sermon, we do not want to hear about the divine homoousia and the internationality of the Trinity. We want to hear how to be better people and how to be happier. We get bored by theology and cling to morality. The religion of Christianity in parts has become a religion of morality. This leads to not only a prevalent anti-intellectualism but a perversion of the Gospel. We want God to be for us, but we do not want to be for God. We have reversed how the relationship between humanity and God operates.

The Criteria for True Religion

The goal of the Enlightenment is to rid the world of suffering, misery, deceit and ignorance. By doing such, the world will be transformed into an utopia. If this is the case, that such transformation is the goal, we then need to ask, "How will it come about?" In this post, I will attempt to give an outline of some key Enlightenment thinkers program of transformation while highlighting what this does to theology and the Church.

The British philosopher John Locke held that one of the keys to this transformation was to foster tolerance. According to James C. Livingston, "the great enemy" of the Enlightenment writers "was not religion but dogmatism and intolerance." (Modern Christian Thought, James C. Livingston, pg. 10) According to Locke's argument, there is a multiplicity of religions, but there can only be one true religion. And our knowledge of the true religion will come from allowing people to investigate and examine all the religions. For "It is only false religion that has anything to fear from the tests of reason and experience." (pg. 10) If we follow this line of thought, we learn that tolerance of other religions does not foster truth. Instead, it fosters a search for the most Reasonable or Experiencable religion. These two criteria for religion than become the standard for religion. When looking at religion after the Enlightenment we still have two questions in our mind:

1.  Is this Religion Reasonable? Can it stand up to the tests of Logic? Is it contradictory in any way? (Another way of saying this is: Does it violate the principle of non-contradiction?) 
2. Does this Religion hold up to my Experience? Does it relate to my way of life? Does it have anything to say to me? Is the truth of this religion evident to my senses and what I have done\can do? 

From this we can gather that Religion has to be either Reasonable or Experiencable, or both. Both of these criterion are still in play today in the way the Church operates. Our apologetics either try to  construct logical arguments that any reasonable person would have to agree with, or we try to show how Christianity works itself out in the everyday and confirms our experiences.

In the next posts, we will examine how these two criteria gained traction in the Church and lead to disaster.

Modernity's Attractiveness

When we look around the world, we see that somethings are apparently self-evident. There is suffering in the world. There is misery in the world. One might even say that it is self-evident that there is evil in the world. Another thing that is seemingly self-evident is that there need not be suffering, misery, or even evil in the world. That there needs to be a way out of this miry pit; a way of salvation.

Beginning in the 18th century, there was a change in the history of Salvation. A new way out of suffering, misery and evil was made evident by the philosophers and theologians. This way out is the way of Reason. "Because misfortune and suffering arise very largely from ignorance, it was believed reason could cast its light in the darkness of superstition and deceit and bring humanity its long-anticipated enlightenment and happiness." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 7) But before we get into how reason brings happiness, we need to address the superstition and deceit that is spoke of by Livingston.

The philosophers and somewhat shockingly, the theologians held that religion has failed us. Religion promised us light and happiness yet it did not deliver. Religion, according to some of the thinkers in the 18th century,  pushed humanity further into the pit of misery of suffering by suppressing thought and praising ignorance. Religion was supposed to make humanity behave better and live better lives. According to thinkers like Voltaire, religion failed to make us better because it was too other-worldly and focused not on the natural but the supernatural.

Who would not want to exchange a better life later on for a better life here-and-now? This is the attractiveness of the Enlightenment. Marquis de Condorcet, a 18th century philosopher, held that the persistence of superstition and error was due to the propagation of Christianity. In his The Progress of the Human Mind, he argued that there needs to be a new eschatological hope. "For writers like Condorcet, hope for posterity became a kin d of eschatological substitute for the tradition Christian hope in the Kingdom of God." (Livingston, pg. 10) Who would not want to be known forever? Would not going down in the annals of history be better than living forever? Or would they be the same?

 By either getting rid of Religion or injecting Reason into Religion, the Enlightenment wanted to change the telos (goal, purpose) of human. The goal of life would no longer be to blindly worship a Diety, but to "examine, weigh, sift, and compare the facts again and again until it could discern the true from the false, the contingent and particular from the necessary and universal.(Livingston, pg. 7)  In short, the new purpose in life was to no longer seek the True God, but only to seek the Truth.

By seeking the Truth, we can then distill out a behavior that would get rid of the suffering and misery in the world. "A this-worldly hope in the future in place of an other-worldly expectation 0in an earthly city in which there will be no more 'mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away.'" (Livingston, pg. 10) For this utopia to happen, Religion needs to take a backseat to Reason, according to the Enlightenment philosophers. When this falling away happens, the end (purpose)_of human life" will fall "exclusively within the present world nad its ideal transformation." (Livingston, pg. 10)

Who would not want to live in this world? Who would not want to live in a world free of deceit, superstition, suffering and mystery? Who would not want to live in a world where everything can be known? Who would not want to become the master of their own life? This is the attractiveness of Modernity.

In the next post, we will examine how this transformation is to come about.

The Modern World

We live in the shadow of the Enlightenment. Some philosophers and theologians would argue that we are post-modern or post-Enlightenment or secular or post-secular, Christian or post-Christian. However, I wish to argue that we are none of these. I believe that we are still firmly grounded in the Enlightenment and that this is problematic for the Church today.

Before I start, I want to give a quick and dirty definition of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a philosophical movement that holds to a few key points:

1. We are autonomous. We are self-governing, self-ruling individuals that do not need an outside authority to tell us what to do. On top of this, we should resist outside authorities, as they have no right to dictate our behavior or thoughts.
2. Our thought is grounded on Reason. We have an ability to understand what is immutable, unchangeable and universal. We can run all of our thoughts, behaviors and beliefs through the filter of Reason and find what is really True.
3. Reason is grounded in Nature. Everything that is True is True not due to human convention or language but because it corresponds to the Natural World free of the influence of the individual.

 What this means is that Truth is out there, in the Natural world for us to find and understand. If we get rid of our personal presuppositions and biases, we will then be able to seek and find Truth. When we get rid of bias and presupposition, we will find Truth.






Now, this attitude towards Truth posed a problem for the Christian Church. The Enlightenment attitude, according to Livingson, gave the Church two options:

1. The Church and theology could find itself "adjusting itself to the advances in modern science and philosophy and, in so doing," risk "accomodation to secularization." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 6)
2. The Church and theology could resist "all influences from culture and" become "largely reactionary and ineffectual in meeting the challenges of life in the modern world." (Livingston, pg. 6)

 Both options have been tried in the Church by different denominations. We have seen the Church fail by the strategies of accommodation and withdrawal. However, I wish to focus, in this series of posts to focus on how the Church failed by trying to accommodate the Enlightenment view.

Instead of jumping into the failure of the Church, we must see why the Enlightenment was attractive to the Church. What would make the Church and theology latch onto this thought process?

Continuing the Journey

Bonhoeffer asked us, How do we be the church in the modern times? This question has been bothering me for a while. Perhaps it has been haunting me, a spectre in the back of my mind that I have been trying to get a grasp of. I think that this question that Bonhoeffer confronts us with is one of, if not, the most important question that has been posed to us.

I am not going to pretend that I have an answer to such a question. However, I think I have an insight that is worth sharing. Yet, before I get to that, I feel that I need to do some background work.

You see, I have recently decided to try to get into a Doctoral position at a local seminary. As I was talking to one of the professors, it was recommended that I read James C. Livingston's Modern Christian Thought (2 vols.). This work is a primer on how Christian thought has developed since the Enlightenment, which will help me understand how the philosophical insights have shaped the Church. In short, it will answer the practical part of Bonhoeffer's question. That is, it will tell us how the Christian church has come to be in the modern era. However, we cannot say that how the church is is how the church should be.

So, I invite you on another little quest. As I read Livingston's book, I will be posting what I glean from the text in light of Bonhoeffer's question.