Chapter 23

1. Chapter 23 The challenge of modernism

2. Questions to be addressed in this chapter • What effect did the religious wars of the seventeenth century have on Christian theology? • How did the scientific and philosophical revolutions influence the trajectory of Christian thought? • How did the deists develop religious thinking in this new climate? • What is the challenge that modernism posed to orthodox Christian thought?

3. The Thirty Years’ War • A step toward religious tolerance. • Separation of church and state. • Mirroring the displacement of the Church from its role in society, theology was also shifting out of the center of intellectual life.

4. Science and philosophy apart from the Church • Galileo’s empirical observations contradicted Church teaching. • Descartes sought to ground theology on absolutely certain philosophical truths. • Christian theism became philosophical theism. • Mind and matter became separate realms. • Facts and values were separated.

5. Deism • Deists believe in God on the grounds of reason but reject the divinity of Christ and Christian revelation. They develop a kind of natural religion. • Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) determined the set of beliefs he thought all reasonable people should accept. • Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683) was one of the leaders of the Cambridge Platonists, for whom God became a personification of reason. • Christianity becomes just a system of ethical dictates, which point no further than to the achievement of our own good (i.e., nothing to say about God).

6. Cherbury’s “Five Articles” or “Common Notions of Religion” • There is a supreme God. • People have an obligation to worship this deity. • Worship is to be identified with a practical morality. • People must repent of sin and abandon it. • There will be rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

7. The challenge of modernism • Reason became the focal point for human understanding. • The world is an ordered place that can be understood by reason. Miracles have no place in such a world. • The Reformers’ emphasis on grace is largely lost, as we are endowed with reason and expected to use it to learn all we need to know about religion. • If theology is subjective, there is no point talking about theological truth; if it is a matter of reason, then it quickly devolves through deism to atheism.

8. Summary of main points • The separation of Church and state encouraged religion to be placed in the private, subjective category of life and thought. • Reason replaced revelation as the foundation of theology, and so Christian theism became philosophical theism. • Deism was an attempt to develop a rational religion which ultimately had exemplary moral conduct as its aim. • The commitments of modernism seem to force Christian thinking into subjectivity or atheism.