Deism

Deism is the position, held by English writers of the late 1600s and 1700s, that God created the world but does not act in it afterward: no revelation, no miracle, no ongoing providence, only a world left to run by its own natural laws. Deists held that reason alone gives everyone the religious truth needed: that God exists, ought to be worshiped, that virtue and repentance matter, and that a future life rewards and punishes accordingly.¹ It denies both special revelation and the deity of Christ as historic Christianity has confessed them.

Historical Origin

Deism took shape in England during the second half of the seventeenth century, growing out of the empiricism of Francis Bacon and the nominalism of William of Ockham in a climate longing for a religion of bare commonality after decades of civil and religious conflict.¹ Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), gave the movement its founding statement in De Veritate (1624), reducing the essence of all religion, including Christianity, to five “common notions”: God exists, he ought to be worshiped, worship should issue in virtue, people must repent of sin, and a future state rewards or punishes accordingly.¹ Charles Hodge lists Herbert’s five points in slightly different order (God’s existence, humanity’s dependence on and obligation to reverence him, piety as the harmony of the human faculties, the essential difference between good and evil, and a future state of rewards and punishment) and calls them, together, “the confession of Faith of all Deists.”²

From Herbert’s foundation the movement’s central program emerged as a direct attack on revelation itself.¹ John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) made reason the judge of what revelation to accept. John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) argued that true Christianity contains nothing above reason, let alone against it, and “excited great attention” along with “numerous refutations.”¹ ² Anthony Collins’s Discourse on Freethinking (1713) urged unbelief under the name of free thought. Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) built a full system on the claim that God would never leave humanity without a religion adequate to its needs, so that any revelation could do no more than restate what an “internal and universal revelation” already gives every person through reason.¹ ² Henry Dodwell’s Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742) pushed Deism into outright skepticism, a line Bavinck says David Hume then “perfected” in his Natural History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776).¹ Hodge judged the Dialogues “the ablest work ever written in support of the Deistical, or rather, Atheistical system.”² The movement crossed to the Netherlands, where it spread alongside Socinian and Remonstrant theology and contributed to a broader eighteenth-century decline of confessional Reformed theology, and English theologians responded with apologetic works on predictive prophecy, miracles, and the credibility of revelation.¹

Core Tenets

Deism holds that God created the universe and then left it to operate by the natural laws he built into it at the start, without further revelation or intervention.¹ On Tindal’s version of the argument, since God could not have intended for any generation to lack an adequate religion, the only “revelation” that can be genuine is one that discloses no more than reason itself already supplies to everyone: that God exists, and that he made humanity for its own good rather than his.² Deism accordingly rejected the supernatural claims of biblical religion, including the miraculous and the necessity of Scripture, while affirming a bare theism stripped of the Trinity, the incarnation, and any ongoing divine action in history.¹ Not every writer in the movement held the same system: Toland went on to call himself a Pantheist, and Hodge lists Hobbes, a Materialist, among the deists’ contemporaries.²

Confessional and Biblical Response

The Second London Baptist Confession opens by denying exactly what Deism affirms about the light of nature: “Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation.”³ Where Deism holds that a universal, natural revelation is all any generation needs, the confession holds that it leaves people without excuse (Rom. 1:20) but without the saving knowledge that only Scripture supplies.

Against Deism’s picture of a God who withdraws after creation, Bavinck argues that God is “no less involved with maintaining the ordinary order of the natural created world” than he is in a miracle: in providence God “respects and develops … the things he called into being in creation,” governing angels, humans, and the rest of the created order each according to its own nature, so that the created order’s regularity is itself an expression of God’s continuing activity rather than evidence of his absence.⁴ Scripture likewise describes God’s ongoing, active relation to what he made rather than a one-time act followed by withdrawal: “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17), and “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). Bavinck classes Deism, alongside pantheism and gnosticism, as a “philosophical confusion” that Christian theology rejects because it fails to hold together, as Scripture does, both God’s transcendence over creation and his continued activity within it.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Rationalism,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 34-61, sec. C, “History.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩²