Age of Enlightenment
From Theopedia
The Enlightenment generally refers to the 18th century intellectual and philosphical developments in Europe. This movement advocated rationality as a means to establish an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge. The intellectual leaders of this movement regarded themselves as courageous and elite, and viewed their purpose as leading the world toward progress and out of a long period of doubtful tradition, full of irrationality, superstition, and tyranny (which they saw resulting from the "Dark Ages").
This movement also provided a framework for the American and French Revolutions, and subsequently the rise of capitalism and the birth of socialism, liberalism and fascism. It corresponded to the high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts, and receives contemporary application in the unity of science movement which includes logical positivism.
Along with the Enlightenment of the 1700's came the Pietist movement, characterized by a focus on belief and piety. Some of its proponents attempted to use rationalism to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief were seen as integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State.
This period also saw the rise of empirical philosophical ideas, and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.
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[edit] Terminology
Bernard Ramm writes that "the approved concepts were reason, freedom, nature, utility, happiness, rights, tolerance, deism, rational Christianity, natural religion, social contract, science, autonomy, harmony, and optimism. The disapproved concepts were authority, antiquity, tradition, church, revelation, the supernatural, and theological explanations." [1]
This article is a stub. Please edit it to add information.[edit] Resources
- Roy S. Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981)
[edit] Notes
- ↑ After Fundamentalism: The Future of Evangelical Theology (Harper & Row, 1983), 3.
