Why Christians Need to Understand The Enlightenment

Understanding The Age of Enlightenment that laid the foundation for America is crucial for understanding our own assumptions. Enlightenment Thinking (ET) replaced religious thinking in an attempt to govern the world better. 

What preceded the Age of Enlightenment was The Renaissance and The Holy Roman Empire (Medieval Christianity) which was itself a mixture of State and Church that the American Revolutionaries attempted to separate. 

A vital part of understanding why we believe what we believe is based on the assumptions we make--the questions we ask at the beginning of our thinking processes that lead to our conclusions or fixed beliefs. 

We need to define our terms and seek to understand all we can about those definitions and the assumptions upon which they are built and this goes far beyond looking up words in a Greek or Hebrew lexicon, for example:

Q: When the Founding Fathers used the term 'God' what did they mean?
A: The Deist God

Q: How long has Deism been around?   
A: Since Ancient Greece

These previous two Qs & As are vital to us for two reasons.

One is because the Deist God is an absentee landlord image of God. A god who unlike the God of the Bible, is unconcerned with the affairs of this world, has set creation in motion, and left men to work it all out. This is what Enlightenment thinkers believed and applied to the God of the Bible.

This is why they believed God judged nations in real time history. They did not want an "afterlife" governing the present life. It's why the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution says that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion. They believed they could run the world better than the Catholic-Protestant Church had.

Enlightenment Thinkers (ET) sought to remove the supernatural elements of the OT & NT based on "Natural" Science or "Nature." This is why Thomas Jefferson could write about "Nature" and "Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence. It was not because he viewed the God of the Bible as you and I do, but because he didn't. We cannot read our conclusions into another person's words anymore that we can project our conclusions about worship and the church upon the first century Christians.

We must seek courageously to understand how people of past generations and cultures were different than ours in thinking and practice, and like David, confront the Goliath of ET head on and with faith to overcome it--not by maintaining erroneous and static "beliefs" that build walls around ourselves. We are in no way compromising truth or values in moving forward in faith (not beliefs) than Israel in the OT. God did not stop acting in the world, even if miracles ceased.

The second Q & A above is vital in understanding ET because it connects the way our culture today assumes and thinks with Ancient Greece (through The Renaissance). Not in any kind of restoration attempt by ET, but in reuniting the governing of the (western) world through dualism to separate running the world from what they viewed were superstitions in religion and, especially, from what they viewed as failure to properly govern the world by the Catholic-Protestant Church. It was not an attempt to eradicate all religion but to separate it from "secular" government, because ETs thought there was a better way than what the Church had done over the last 1500 years.

Greek Dualism had always been part of Church Thinking in the form of clergy-laity, but now there would be "religious" and "secular" groups. Now there would be a "secular" intensified separation of the "physical" from the "spiritual." Ancient Christians, though separate from the State for the first 300 years of the Church, would have not thought this way. Their religion was part of their "government," (in the form of paganism and Emperor worship or Jewish Sanhedrin, etc.) as much as it was their everyday lives (Acts 2:42-46). But this is still not how we view it today. We cannot project our thinking and practices back on to the first century thinking and practice.

America was never a Christian Nation in the strict sense as is pointed out above, and the churches of Christ have not been fully restored to a separate nation Jesus created that includes both the "physical" and "spiritual" (Mat. 21:43). Our cardinal doctrine of resurrection is both physical and spiritual. And this is the sleight of hand:

That Christians in America want to be American more than Christian. As long as this desire and misunderstanding exists, then the Enlightenment will continue to dominate in the minds of Christians. Those in the world want it that way; it's their home field advantage, but when Christians are not even aware of why we think the way we do, or we are mis-taught by teachers, then a less than adequate  service is being rendered in the cause of Christ in my opinion-- a reaction to ET that is based more on ET than Christianity of the first century we claim to practice.

This is a sad state indeed for any people not to understand themselves, nor the world in which they live. How on earth could we ever find our place in all this? Perhaps this is why we continue to place the most importance on forms of "worship" and fight over what those should be rather than engage the principalities and powers of ET as David confronted Goliath.

David did not use Saul's armor, but used a familiar weapon which he understood to defeat the ungodly talk of Goliath. We can do the same the more we understand better ourselves, the first century, our misguided intellectual opponents and how they affect our own thinking.