Kant and Hume: When Reason Undermined Itself | Church History 121

[00:00:01][music] >> It's almost summer here in Southern California where I live and so I'm wearing my my summer attire.

[00:00:20]You know, we spend a good deal of time working through the Renaissance, Reformation, the Enlightenment and I think it's now time to pause and take stock of what those seismic movements produced, particularly in the British Isles. That is before we press forward into the 19th century where the story only gets more complicated and really largely because of what's happening here in the 18th.

[00:00:43]If you've ever heard someone say that the founding fathers of America were deists, you wondered exactly what that means, I think you're in luck because deism it finds its spiritual home right here in 18th century England. And understanding deism will help you understand a great deal about the world that we live in today. So, let's set the stage.

[00:01:02]By the year 1700, England was a country that had been through the wringer, the Civil War, uh the beheading of their monarch, the king, uh the Puritan Commonwealth, the restoration of the monarchy, then the Glorious Revolution.

[00:01:15]You know, the English had packed more political and religious drama into the previous century than most nations manage in five centuries.

[00:01:23]But now entering the 18th, they were tired and into that fatigue stepped a new and sophisticated challenge to the Christian faith.

[00:01:32]But first, a word about the religious landscape of the British Isles.

[00:01:37]England, of course, was officially Anglican, but it was also a patchwork of competing traditions, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and there was a small but stubborn Catholic minority.

[00:01:48]I think the Catholics probably had the hardest time of it.

[00:01:51]Though the philosopher John Locke was a famously vocal advocate of religious tolerance, he made it clear that tolerance did not extend to Catholics.

[00:02:01]You see, English paranoia about a Catholic conspiracy to reclaim the throne was so intense that in 1699, a statute actually made the saying of the Latin Mass a crime.

[00:02:12]In 1753, the Marriage Act declared that any marriage not performed according to the Anglican right was invalid.

[00:02:18]And of course, there were exceptions for the Quakers and the Jews.

[00:02:21]Not exactly the tolerant England that Locke advertised. Now, Catholic numbers in England remain tiny throughout the century, no more than maybe 80,000 by 1770.

[00:02:33]They lacked civil and political rights, and their situation didn't improve until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.

[00:02:41]Along the way, when a law banning the Latin Mass was repealed in 1780, Protestant mobs burned down Catholic homes and churches.

[00:02:50]Religious tolerance in 18th-century England was very much a work in progress.

[00:02:55]Now, here is where things get philosophically interesting, and where we need to slow down and explain what deism actually was, or better to say is, because it's genuinely important and a few people still loosely hang on to it.

[00:03:09]So, imagine that you've been raised on the new science of Newton, Bacon, Descartes.

[00:03:14]You've come to believe that the universe operates by fixed, rational, and discoverable laws.

[00:03:19]You've grown skeptical of institutional religion, priests who claim special access to divine truth, of miracles that seem to, well, violate the very rational order that God supposedly put in place.

[00:03:30]You're educated, you're sophisticated, and you find the squabbling of those Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics, frankly, you find it embarrassing.

[00:03:38]You still believe in God. You're not an atheist, but you believe in a God that makes rational sense, follows the rules.

[00:03:46]That, in broad strokes, is how you become a deist.

[00:03:50]The roots of English deism go back to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who in 1645 proposed five articles as the foundation of a rational religion.

[00:04:00]Number one, God exists. Number two, human beings are obliged to revere that God. Three, true worship of God consists primarily in practical morality, you know, living rightly. Fourth, sins to be avoided. And five, the afterlife involves either reward or punishment based on how one has lived by that rule of morality.

[00:04:22]Notice what's missing from that list.

[00:04:24]There's no scripture, no incarnation, no atonement, no resurrection, no church, and no sacraments.

[00:04:31]There's no special revelation of any kind, just God, morality, and consequences. All discoverable by unaided human reason.

[00:04:40]The deist God was often described as a divine watchmaker. He designed and built the universe, a magnificent, intricate, perfectly calibrated mechanism. He wound it up, and then he stepped back and let it run.

[00:04:55]He doesn't intervene in history. He doesn't answer prayer. He doesn't perform miracles because miracles would mean violating the fixed laws that he had established in the physical universe. So, they would be irrational.

[00:05:08]The God of deism is brilliant, remote, and frankly not all that interested in human beings personally.

[00:05:15]Now, you can see why the American founders are often described as deists.

[00:05:18]Many of them, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and a few others, were products of exactly that intellectual mold.

[00:05:26]In fact, Thomas Jefferson famously took a razor to his Bible and cut out every miracle, producing a version of the Gospels that was essentially a moral philosophy text. The God of the Declaration of Independence, think about it, it's nature's God and the creator who endows men with rights and to whose judgment the signers appeal to, That's far more deist than Christian.

[00:05:50]He's an architect and a moral guarantor, not the God of Abraham who parts seas, raises the dead, and speaks from burning bushes.

[00:05:58]By the early 19th century, deism had captured the imagination of the English intellectual class with stunning speed.

[00:06:06]John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious in 1696 opened the floodgates of deist literature.

[00:06:13]The Baron de Montesquieu visited England in 1729 and wrote that when the subject of religion was raised, it, quote, "Excites nothing but laughter." Unquote.

[00:06:24]Daniel Defoe, yeah, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, complained in 1722 that, quote, "No age since the founding of the Christian Church was ever like an open about atheism, blasphemies, and heresies to the age we now live in."

[00:06:39]Unquote.

[00:06:40]The deists were not shy about what they believed. As one Christian apologist summarized their position, quote, "That the soul is material, Christianity a cheat, scripture a falsehood, hell a fable, heaven a dream, our life without providence, and our death without hope."

[00:06:57]Unquote.

[00:06:58]That's pretty strong stuff, but a pretty accurate description of deism.

[00:07:02]Now, for a while, the church seemed to be caught flat-footed. The deist challenge was sophisticated, and it came dressed in the language of reason and progress.

[00:07:11]But, Christianity didn't just roll over and play dead.

[00:07:15]And one of the most effective early responses was Jacques Abbadie's Treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion, and published in 1684 and widely circulated throughout the 18th century.

[00:07:26]Abbadie was a Protestant pastor in London, and he went after the deists on their own terms, with facts.

[00:07:34]He pointed to the public nature of Christ's post-resurrection appearances.

[00:07:39]He argued that the transformation of the disciples from men hiding in terror to men who preach openly and died for what they claimed to have witnessed. That was not the behavior of people perpetrating a hoax.

[00:07:52]His arguments remain staples of Christian apologetics to this day.

[00:07:56]In 18th century France, a body's work was found in more aristocratic libraries than even the great Bossuet or Pascal.

[00:08:05]And of course the deists had a philosophical ally in the Scottish skeptic David Hume. You may remember that he had attacked the very concept of cause and effect arguing that it was merely an unexamined assumption.

[00:08:16]Hume's ideas pushed to their logical conclusion made knowledge of anything impossible.

[00:08:22]A kind of intellectual acid that dissolved foundations rather than building them.

[00:08:27]John Wesley was not impressed. He described Hume as quote, "The most insolent despiser of truth and virtue that ever appeared in the world."

[00:08:35]Unquote.

[00:08:37]Now as we saw in a recent episode, the answer to Hume came from another Scotsman, Thomas Reid in 1764 in his essay on inquiry into the human mind on the principles of common sense.

[00:08:49]Reid argued that Hume's philosophy produced absurd conclusions that no rational person actually lives by.

[00:08:56]His common sense philosophy became enormously influential, especially in America where it shaped the thinking of the early republic.

[00:09:04]Reid compared Hume's theory of ideas to the Trojan horse, beautiful on the outside but carrying destruction within.

[00:09:12]By 1790, the statesman Edmund Burke could observe with satisfaction that Christian apologists had largely won the intellectual argument against the deists.

[00:09:22]The challenge had been answered and it had been answered not only with arguments but with something the deists simply couldn't manufacture in a library.

[00:09:31]Revival.

[00:09:34]In Scotland of 1700, we find it a land of striking contrast. The Highland clans maintained their ancient warlike culture in the rugged north, but in Edinburgh, the capital, it was a cramped city of barely 35,000 souls stacked into dirty tenements.

[00:09:50]Then, in 1707, the Act of Union dissolved the Scottish Parliament and merged it with England's, a politically contentious move that left deep resentment on both sides of the border.

[00:10:01]The religious situation was equally fraught because the Patronage Act of 1712 had gave the English crown the right to appoint Scottish pastors, which Presbyterians regarded as an Anglican power grab. Many refused to recognize crown-appointed clergy and formed independent congregations.

[00:10:20]Scottish religious identity and Scottish national identity were thoroughly intertwined. You just didn't pull those apart.

[00:10:28]Yet, out of this friction came fire.

[00:10:30]In 1742, a revival broke out in the small town of Cambuslang, about 4 miles from Glasgow.

[00:10:36]For 4 months, people attended prayer meetings with an intensity that astonished observers.

[00:10:43]George Whitefield visited there in June, and by August, gatherings had swelled to an estimated 40,000 people.

[00:10:50]The local pastor wrote that, "People sat unwearied till 2:00 in the morning to hear sermons, disregarding the weather.

[00:10:57]You could scarce walk a yard, but you must tread on some, either rejoicing in God for mercies received or crying out for more."

[00:11:04]Unquote.

[00:11:06]This was the same Scotland that would soon produce the Enlightenment's greatest minds: Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Francis Hutcheson.

[00:11:15]Voltaire wrote that, "Today, from Scotland that we get rules of taste and all the arts, from epic poetry to the gardening." Unquote.

[00:11:23]The Scottish intellectual culture found a way to hold serious inquiry and evangelistic faith in the same hands.

[00:11:30]Edinburgh pastors like John Erskine embraced elements of Enlightenment thinking while insisting that genuine social reform required personal conversion to Christ.

[00:11:41]Erskine promoted the works of George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, helping to distribute them across the Atlantic world.

[00:11:48]If Scotland's story is complicated, Ireland's is heartbreaking.

[00:11:53]The Glorious Revolution, celebrated in England as a bloodless triumph, and later arrived in England as a military conquest.

[00:12:01]On July 1st of 1690, the Protestant forces of King William III crushed the Catholic army of James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

[00:12:09]The consequences for Irish Catholics were severe.

[00:12:13]The Banishment Act of 1697 ordered all Catholic clergy to leave Ireland or face execution.

[00:12:21]Power was concentrated in the hands of a small Anglican elite, the Church of Ireland it was called, who dominated political and economic life.

[00:12:30]Even the Presbyterian Scots, who had settled in Ulster, found themselves excluded from full civil participation.

[00:12:37]The Irish, Catholic and Protestant alike, were required to pay the cost of quartering English troops on their own soil.

[00:12:44]Now, some Catholic priests refused to abandon their people. They shed their clerical dress and ministered in secret, risking their lives to bring sacraments to the Irish Catholics who had no one else to turn to.

[00:12:57]The century did bring gradual, halting improvement. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 allowed Catholics to buy and inherit land.

[00:13:06]Then in 1782, the Irish Parliament gained a measure of independence, and the most punitive laws were erased. But England maintained firm control, and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was put down with force.

[00:13:20]By 1790, Methodism had taken hold in Ireland, with some 14,000 adherents, mostly in the north. But Catholic Protestant relations remain poisonous.

[00:13:29]Mutual hostility entrenched across generations of conquest, dispossession of land, and intense suffering.

[00:13:37]So, what do we make of this turbulent century in the British Isles?

[00:13:42]Well, the gospel faced a formidable assault from deists who dismantled miracle and special revelation, uh from skeptics who dissolved the very possibility of knowledge, and from an intellectual culture that had decided Christianity was the hobby of the uneducated. And for a time, the church struggled to respond.

[00:14:01]But respond it did.

[00:14:03]The apologetic tradition that emerged from the era, evidence-based, philosophically rigorous, unafraid to engage on the terms the culture set, is the direct ancestor of Christian apologetics today.

[00:14:16]Every time someone reads C.S. Lewis or Tim Keller or Lee Strobel, they're drinking from wells dug in the 18th century.

[00:14:25]And then there's the matter of revival.

[00:14:27]The deist had no answer for Cambuslang.

[00:14:30]He had no response to tens of thousands of people gathered on a Scottish hillside weeping and rejoicing under the preaching of the gospel.

[00:14:39]Reason is a tool, but the wind of the spirit blows where it will.

[00:14:43]And in the 18th century, it blew hard across the British Isles.

[00:14:47]Christianity was tested here, and it passed that test. [music]