Why can’t religion and the Enlightenment be friends? What’s that, you say? They were friends? Why didn’t anyone tell us? Well, David Sorkin has. A professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin, he argues in a new study that religion and the Enlightenment were even more than friends. “In the academic as well as the popular imagination,” Dr. Sorkin writes, “the Enlightenment figures as a quintessentially secular phenomenon — indeed, as the very source of modern secular culture.” But contrary to this “secular master narrative,” he argues, “the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief,” it actually generated new formulations of that belief. Such theological formulations were no less an essential part of Enlightenment thought, he insists, than the deist, materialist or antireligious ideas often identified with it and regularly wheeled into the front lines of today’s cultural and political wars. In “The Religious Enlightenment,” a book published in August by Princeton University Press, Dr. Sorkin aims at nothing less than “to revise our understanding of the Enlightenment.” Building on recent scholarship highlighting the ideological and geographical diversity of 18th century thought, Dr. Sorkin posits a specifically religious Enlightenment that not only shared characteristics across confessional lines as well as national borders — hence his book’s subtitle, “Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna”— but also “may have had more influential adherents and exerted more power in its day than either the moderate or the radical version of the Enlightenment.” Leading thinkers of this religious Enlightenment, he explains, sought a “reasonable” faith that was answerable to contemporary science and philosophy, and not grounded merely on dogmatic authority, pure emotion or fascination with the miraculous. These thinkers agreed with deists that there was a kind of “natural religion,” basic truths about God and morality accessible to reasoning people. Natural religion was not a rival or alternative, however, to revealed religion. It was a prelude, a necessary but insufficient foundation for belief. Without a further belief resting on revelation, reason was likely to end in skepticism and immorality. To interpret this revelation, a.k.a., the Bible, leaders of the religious Enlightenment generally employed the principle of “accommodation”: the conviction that God had “accommodated” humanity’s limited understanding by using language, imagery and stories suited to particular ages and cultures. The transcendent truths of sacred texts had to be extracted from what was historically conditioned. The standard-bearers of the religious Enlightenment championed religious toleration and the freedom of religious minorities, although they stopped well short of calling for state neutrality in religious affairs. They believed in established churches that fostered public virtue through moral instruction and official ritual without coercing dissenters. Like their secular counterparts, they were eager to put in place their reforming ideas through the power of enlightened monarchs. Also like their secular counterparts, the leading figures of the religious Enlightenment were active in the newly emerging public sphere, the so-called “republic of letters.” These religious writers shared and shaped ideas through wide-reaching networks of acquaintance, correspondence and publishing. They were engaged with secular concerns; wrote about history, philosophy, politics and current affairs; and crossed intellectual paths — or swords — with Enlightenment giants like Montesquieu, Voltaire, d’Alembert and Rousseau. Dr. Sorkin’s book is something of a sandwich. In the opening and concluding chapters, he sets out his programmatic proposal for restoring religion to the conventional portrait of the Enlightenment. In between are detailed studies of six representatives of the religious Enlightenment. William Warburton was a learned and pugnacious thinker within the Church of England. Jacob Vernet reigned over Calvinism in Geneva. The Lutheran theologian Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten was praised by Voltaire as “the jewel in the crown of German scholarship.” Moses Mendelssohn, a paragon of Enlightenment Judaism, translated the Pentateuch into German, and advocated Jewish emancipation. Joseph Valentin Eybel promoted Catholic reform under the Hapsburgs. Adrien Lamourette, Catholic priest and political pamphleteer, was elected bishop of Lyons in the Constitutional Church of the French Revolution. These are hardly household names, not even in households boasting advanced degrees in history or theology. And these are formidable chapters that may challenge even some scholarly specialists, so dense are the references to religious politics and theological “isms” as the author works his way from Protestantism (in Anglican, Calvinist and Lutheran flavors) to Judaism and Catholicism and across the continent from Hanoverian England to Hohenzollern Prussia and Hapsburg Austria. Dr. Sorkin acknowledges that he has focused on “second-rank figures,” however prominent in their day, although being second rank may make them more representative rather than less so. He stoutly rebuts the assertion that these thinkers were not “sincere believers and apologists” but “trimmers” looking for a comfortable perch partway down the slippery slope to unbelief. It is a charge, Dr. Sorkin believes, resting on the assumption that the only viable alternatives were the existing orthodoxies or total secularization. Today’s advocates of religious toleration, historically informed interpreters of Scripture and open-minded engagement with the full range of contemporary ideas will naturally feel a link to these earlier thinkers. Still, these six individuals make a less-than-winning case for the viability of the religious Enlightenment. For one thing, they constructed their theories on what now look like questionable philosophical foundations provided by Descartes, Locke and Christian Wolff. More seriously, their alliances with state power seem to taint the independence of their thinking. And anyone trying to gauge their religious import may long for more glimpses of inspiration in their spiritual and personal lives behind Dr. Sorkin’s exhaustive account of their ideas. Most of their stories end sadly, as new generations push aside the pioneers of the religious Enlightenment. The final and extreme case was Lamourette, who tried to slow the French Revolution he had promoted. In 1794, he was guillotined. The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath not only destroyed the religious Enlightenment in practice; it also created, as Dr. Sorkin notes, a “religious-secular dichotomy” that condemned this side of the Enlightenment to historical obscurity. Rescuing it from that obscurity, he insists, is of much more than academic interest. “The twenty-first century has begun with seemingly unbridgeable chasms between secularism and believers,” Dr. Sorkin writes. “One step in averting such a parlous situation is to recover the notion of an Enlightenment spectrum that, by including the religious Enlightenment, complicates our understanding of belief’s critical and abiding role in modern culture.”
In the Enlightenment, scientists had described a world that functioned according to laws laid down by God, who had set everything up and then left it to its own devices. This was deism. The theory of evolution denied the direct creation of man by God, and the greatest damage came from the application of that theory to the development of religion. The Enlightenment and the church had a complicated and frequently hostile relationship. Read a variety of books about liberal theology or atheism versus Christianity, and you’ll hear people talk about how the Enlightenment has affected conversations about faith. If you didn’t study philosophy in college, you might be confused by this. Here’s a basic look at what the Enlightenment was and how it affected the church. What Was the Enlightenment?Sometimes also called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was a new movement of ideas that started in the last seventeenth century and continued until the early nineteenth century. Different scholars place different date ranges on it, which means sometimes the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation are considered part of the movement, sometimes not. Not only that, but the Enlightenment intersected a lot with political events and scientific discoveries at the time, informing each other. As a result, it’s hard to perfectly summarize the movement. Broadly speaking though, the Enlightenment emphasized questioning religious authorities had described the Bible, preferring reason and science’s ability to prove things over traditional authorities. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on the history of the Enlightenment has an interesting quote about Isaac Newton, the man who discovered the laws of gravity. It says that Newton’s book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy presented new theories for science that eventually led to “the great idea of the Enlightenment: that man, guided by the light of reason, could explain all natural phenomena and could embark on the study of his own place in a world that was no longer mysterious.” Many scientists and thinkers who contributed to the Enlightenment were Christians (Newton for one). However, as a whole, the movement became about rejecting Christian ideas in favor of classical philosophy (ancient Greek, Roman, etc.) and the idea that one did not need faith in God to explain the world. What Is a Brief Timeline of the Events of the Enlightenment?As noted earlier, it’s hard to create a really definitive view of what the Enlightenment was, which makes it hard to summarize its key moments. Here are some of the seminal events, mostly limited to the philosophical works that define the era’s beliefs. 1687: Isaac Newton published “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” This book showed mathematical principles that accurately showed and predicted how planets moved. This may not sound like much, but it was shocking at the time: it meant that the universe had strict laws which could be predicted. Enlightenment thinkers took up this idea and many reached the conclusion that people could describe the universe while leaving God out entirely. Math and reason were sufficient for explaining how things work. 1689: John Locke publishes “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” where he argued that there are no universally acknowledged truths and that humans are born without any innate knowledge. Among other things, this promoted empiricism, the belief that we know things only through what we can sense or experience. This rules out the idea that all humans have an innate idea that God must exist, and many thinkers used to reject the idea of knowledge coming from anywhere except what we can observe (i.e., no divine revelation). 1746: French geologist Jean-Étienne Guettard publishes “Mineralogical Memoir and Map on the Nature and Location of the Terrains That Traverse France and England.” Guettard’s research had many effects, but on the main ones was it seemed to show the earth was older than Old Testament timelines suggested at the time. This led to much debate about whether the Bible was reliable. 1759: Voltaire publishes his fictional work, Candide. Voltaire wrote philosophy as well as fiction (and many other things), and his philosophy is probably more influential but it’s hard to pick one philosophical book that was most important. Candide is notable because it was a controversial book that satirizes government and religious leaders, which summed the cynical view of authority that became so important to the Enlightenment. 1776: Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson used many Judeo-Christian ideas in his writing, he also drew a lot on Enlightenment ideas that church and state should be separate and that humans have inalienable rights to liberty and happiness (wording that earlier Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke had used). Jefferson would later become notorious for disregarding supernatural elements in the four Gospels and produced The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (or “the Jefferson Bible”) which tells the Gospels with most of the supernatural elements removed. 1789: The French Revolution takes place. While both the American and the French Revolution were based around thinkers who used Enlightenment ideas, the French Revolution took a more secular approach. It was a revolution with God removed from the equation entirely and all the emphasis on reason. Writers such as Os Guinness have suggested that much of what we see today in modern secular liberalism owes more to the French Revolution’s ideas than anything else. Some of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers were Christians and many of their ideas did benefit society. In some cases, scholars still debate whether certain Enlightenment ideas were anti-church or just applied incorrectly. This means that it wouldn’t be accurate to say the Enlightenment was totally negative. However, there were Enlightenment ideas that damaged the church in many ways, including the following: Challenging divine revelation. The Enlightenment argued for basing knowledge on what we know and that we can’t be born with the knowledge of things (such as a sense of the divine or an objective moral code). This led to debates about whether God can communicate with people. As a result, notable Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson and Thomas Paine were Deists, a philosophy that argued God existed but didn’t communicate with people. We can also see the emphasis today in arguments for moral relativism. Challenging Christian societies. Because the Enlightenment favored classical civilizations and ways of viewing the world, it set up the idea that civilizations bound by Christian ideas had missed the boat. This led to the popular idea of religious societies as being primitive or dark, stereotyping the Christian medieval period as essentially foolish or unhealthy. Challenging the Bible. While Charles Darwin would not release Origin of the Species until after the Enlightenment, the essential conflict of evolution versus creationism debates was set up in the Enlightenment. Geology research had shown the world was older than Old Testament scholars described it, which challenged the Bible’s view of history and how the universe developed. This “faith versus science” or “faith versus reason” debate has continued to frame many debates about evolution, Biblical history, and science. Strangely, the “faith versus reason” debate has even affected fields fighting against “the Enlightenment effect,” such as Christian apologetics. It has become very popular to present arguments for Christianity using modern science, such as arguing that based on current physics the universe could only exist if it requires a creator. This kind of apologetics can help and it works when apologists are honest about what can be shown with science. However, many have gotten used to the pseudo-Enlightenment idea that science can’t be disputed. In fact, continuing research means scientists’ ideas are always changing as they get new information. This means in the same way that secular scientists can’t throw out the Bible entirely because it doesn’t fit their theories, apologists can’t add a little science to their arguments and flaunt their ideas as undisputed truths. We have to be honest about what science can (and cannot) show. How Can Christians Respond to the Impact of the Enlightenment Today?While there are a number of things Christians should do about Enlightenment thinking, here are three things we can do all do about its legacy: Encourage reading history. It’s not until we go back to original sources, considering what people said and why they said it, that we really gain the information we need to fully challenge ideas. This is especially important with the Enlightenment, where we have some thinkers who were anti-Christian and others who had more nuanced views. We need to read about the Enlightenment before we can understand its mistakes and its benefits. This is especially true right now in America, where many people challenge America’s foundations and argue whether it has Christian ideas in its foundation. Understanding how the Founding Fathers’ ideas fit with the Enlightenment and with Judeo-Christian ideas (especially as compared to the French Revolution) allows us to understand whether America can be considered a “Christian nation” or not. Promote a better understanding of science. While we can debate evolution and whether the Bible describes an exact historical timeline that doesn’t fit geology, science and faith don’t have to be seen as utter opponents. The more we understand science and its inherent limits, the more we find the idea that science serves as a substitute for religion doesn’t work. Many times scientific theories have nuance we don’t notice until we study them in-depth, and what seems to be opposed to Biblical ideas may complement them. The more we encourage people to look carefully at science, the more we can avoid easy “faith versus science” arguments that take things out of context and don’t go anywhere. Point out what humans can and can’t know. One of the distinctly negative effects of the Enlightenment was it created the impression that humans could be all-knowing, figuring everything out themselves. As science has helped us to understand how much our view of the world is informed by environmental factors or things we don’t fully understand (such as quantum physics), we’re moving back to the understanding that human beings are fallible and there are many things we don’t (or can’t) know. Recognizing that truth will help us see science’s limits and that we aren’t smart enough to live without a space for God. Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/Urupong 
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