Challenges from the Enlightenment

The Reformation and the Seeds of Enlightenment

The Protestant Reformation was possible in part because Europe was already experiencing a drift away from the church. The Roman church had become increasingly corrupt in the late Middle Ages, and it was weaker politically than at its height. One hundred years earlier, Luther might have been burned at the stake like Jan Hus was in 1415. By the 1500s, it was possible in some places to critique the church and live.

This move away from the authority of the church was not always replaced by the fervor of a Lutheran or an Anabaptist. Sometimes it opened the door for thinking that was heretical or outside the bounds of orthodoxy. In 1553, a man named Servetus was burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva because he concluded that “Scripture alone” did not teach the Trinity. 

Renaissance and the Dawn of Secular Thinking in the Church

The Roman Catholic Church itself already had quite a bit of non-Christian, “secular” thinking going on within its walls. Even before Luther, the Renaissance had begun, which involved a return to Greek and Roman art and culture prior to the rise of Christianity. This movement thought of itself as a rebirth, which suggested that the Middle Ages – when the church ruled – was not exactly alive.

Some have spoken of what soon happened as the “disenchantment” of European thinking. Instead of believing in a world filled with God, angels, and demons, there was the rise of the scientific method and a universe that was understood to be more like a machine. Deism began to rise in the 1600s and 1700s. Deism believes that God created the world to run according to certain laws but is no longer involved in the world. The world began to lose its spiritual dimension for many thinkers.

The Enlightenment: Reason, Science, and the Decline of Traditional Faith

This period was later called the Enlightenment, a so-called “Age of Reason.” God was seen as the Creator but not considered a factor in day-to-day life. The period emphasized reason, science, and individualism over traditional authority and faith. 

The Enlightenment placed human reason at the center of knowledge and understanding. It challenged the view that revelation and faith were the primary sources of truth. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that reason alone, without the need for religious doctrine, could guide ethics and understanding. There was a growing skepticism about the supernatural elements of Christianity, including miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and the authority of the Bible.

The scientific revolution did pose challenges to traditional Christian views. Discoveries by scientists like Galileo and Newton contradicted the literal interpretations of certain biblical texts. The Bible uses imagery that sounds like the sun goes around the earth or that pictures hell directly below us in the earth. While we now take that language as figurative today, it was taken literally at the time. The growing emphasis on empirical evidence and the scientific method no doubt had the effect of weakening religious and biblical authority for some.

Enlightenment thinkers also advocated for separation of church and state and for religious tolerance. Philosophers like John Locke argued for the fundamental right to freedom of conscience and the pluralism of religious beliefs. The United States itself in its Constitution would forbid a state religion so that the country could not insist you be Catholic, Puritan, or even religious at all. 

This freedom to think freely quickly brought questions about Christian faith and a critical eye on traditional Christian beliefs and the Bible. If natural laws can explain lightning or motion, then the idea of miracles seems out of place. Could miracles simply be the working of scientific laws we haven’t yet discovered? Or are miracles actually legends or superstitions? Many thinkers stopped believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth.

Challenges to Christian Orthodoxy: Liberal Theology and Scientific Developments

In the face of scientific developments and Enlightenment thinking, some Christians rejected some or most of the ideas of Christianity, leaving only the feelings and values of traditional Christianity. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is sometimes called “The Father of Liberal Theology,” where liberal means free-thinking beyond what the church and dogma might require. He is famous for saying that the truth of Christianity is in the subjective “religious feeling” of a religious person, not in the content of what they are believing.

In the video, Dr. Bud Bence mentions Charles Sheldon, who did not believe in the virgin birth or resurrection of Jesus, but still believed that Jesus was the ideal moral example. He was part of what has been called the “social gospel” movement in the early twentieth century. This movement only had half of Christianity. They kept the ethics of Christianity but rejected the beliefs of Christianity about God and the Bible.

The late 1800s, in particular, shook the world of Christian faith. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, arguing that humans and all life had evolved over millions of years from simpler organisms. Evolution not only undermined the traditional understanding of Genesis. It posed a significant challenge to the sense that sin and death had entered the world through Adam (cf. Rom. 5:12). 

Similarly, the late 1800s saw the rise of “higher criticism” of the Bible. German scholars, in particular, applied the scientific method to the Bible and began to analyze the Bible as if it were any other book. Some, because they did not allow for miracles, came up with alternative explanations for stories and histories. Without caution, they looked for sources and oral traditions as if they were dissecting a frog. The Bible itself was “disenchanted” of its spiritual character and authority.

Christians continue to wrestle with some of these challenges from the modern era even today. Clearly, science has brought great insights and benefits to us. The advances of modern medicine are phenomenal, and we have to think that God has allowed or even directed these advances. So at what point should we stop thinking in terms of natural law and cause-effect explanations and recognize that God sometimes performs miracles that “break the rules” of his own creation?

Similarly, an inductive approach to Bible study asks what the words of the Bible most likely meant in their original context. Surely it is honoring to God to ask what the text most likely meant originally, even if it would conflict with the thinking of the particular church to which I belong. And the idea that Matthew used Mark as a source does not seem heretical in itself – can’t God inspire editing too? So at what point should historical thinking yield to a sense that God’s inspiration worked at some point outside of the way normal human writing happens?

These are questions Christians are still wrestling with today.