Modernism

Modernism is the worldview that emerged from the European Enlightenment, in which autonomous human reason and empirical science, not special revelation, became the final judges of truth. It treats the advance of scientific knowledge as proof that mankind can reach ultimate truth and secure its own progress unaided by God, replacing the church’s authority with that of the reasoning human subject. In theology, this produced a sustained effort to restate Christian doctrine within a purely natural, materialist framework, trimming or discarding whatever doctrine will not fit.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates the term “modernism” and names no such movement directly, but its opening chapter states the position modernism’s central claim runs against, the same ground Age of Enlightenment already stakes out for the Enlightenment’s own version of the claim. General revelation, “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence,” is real but limited: sufficient “to leave men inexcusable,” yet “not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”² Scripture alone supplies “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life,” either “expressly set down or necessarily contained” in it, “unto which nothing at any time is to be added.”³ Modernism’s claim that unaided reason and science can reach ultimate truth on their own, with no need of Scripture’s own testimony, is precisely what these two paragraphs deny.

Historical Development

Enlightenment origins and the turn to the human subject

The rejection of the medieval, nominalist picture of an arbitrary, unpredictable God left European thought searching for a source of order that did not depend on him. The resulting drive to secure human autonomy against a hostile natural world was already at work by the fifteenth century, and it matured into a settled set of assumptions, materialism, nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism, that came to flourish during the Enlightenment (1650-1800).⁴ Within Protestant orthodoxy itself, the eighteenth century saw the same turn from another direction: pietism shifted attention from objective doctrine to inward religious feeling, and Enlightenment rationalism “undermined the authority of orthodox doctrine and theology by enthroning autonomous reason to a place of dominance over the objective truth of Scripture,” so that “philosophy triumphed over theology.”⁵ Immanuel Kant made this rationalism explicit, recasting religion as a rationalistic enterprise oriented toward morality rather than a body of revealed doctrine.⁵

The nineteenth-century turn to the subject and modernist synthesis

Kant’s rationalism provoked a Romantic reaction in Hamann, Jacobi, and Herder that relocated religious authority in immediate human feeling rather than in revealed doctrine. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology, which made religion “the enjoyment of God in feeling,” was this reaction’s culmination; Hegel’s idealism reached a similar subject-centered result by a rationalist route instead.⁵ By the later nineteenth century, Lutheran theologians such as Kaftan and Seeberg were attempting a “mediating theology” that sought “to join orthodoxy and modernism in some kind of synthesis.”⁵ The same period supplied the movement’s other main root: historical-critical study of the Bible, traced to Spinoza, and Schleiermacher’s own revisionist reworking of Christian doctrine together made up what would later be called the “liberal project.”¹

Modernism as a defined system in the early twentieth century

Writing in 1932, Loraine Boettner described an intellectual climate in which “the emphasis today is upon the physical sciences, upon rationalism in thought and sentiment,” so that “the tendency is to take the Bible merely as a human production and to look upon Christ merely as the outstanding man.” On this description, “present day Modernism, which in its consistent form is pure naturalism and autosoteric, is the very antithesis of Calvinism.”⁶ He traced a theological decline running from Calvinism to Arminianism and from Arminianism to Modernism or Unitarianism, a decline he judged self-destructive wherever it ran its full course.⁷

The twentieth-century liberal project and postmodernism as its outworking

Twentieth-century theology, apart from a partial interruption in Karl Barth’s own work, continued the nineteenth-century liberal project’s pantheizing tendencies, restating Christian doctrine on the basis of whatever “modern metaphysics” the age took to be authoritative, then trimming, revising, or discarding any doctrine that would not fit.¹ Late-twentieth-century postmodernism styled itself a rejection of this modernist confidence, but the materialism, nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism it shares with modernism were already present from the beginning of the modern project; postmodernism, on this reading, is more accurately called “hypermodernism,” since it is “merely the logical outworking of modernist metaphysical assumptions” rather than a genuine departure from them.¹

Objections and Responses

Modern science’s demonstrated success shows that autonomous reason can reach truth without revelation. What presents itself as a neutral “scientific worldview” is, on this analysis, “just materialist metaphysics in a white lab coat”: a substantive metaphysical commitment rather than a finding of empirical science itself, one that displaces belief in creation, sin, and redemption not by refuting these doctrines but by supplying a rival framework that no longer has room for them.¹ The “liberal project” that followed did not test Christian doctrine against this framework and find it wanting; it began from the assumption that the framework was authoritative and revised doctrine to fit it, trimming whatever would not conform.¹

Postmodernism’s rejection of modernism’s confidence in reason offers Christianity a natural ally against modernist rationalism. The metaphysical assumptions postmodern thought is often credited with overturning, materialism, nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism, were already built into the modern project from its beginning and simply flourished during the Enlightenment; postmodernism draws out what those assumptions already implied rather than abandoning them, which is why it is better named “hypermodernism.”¹ A worldview that only intensifies modernism’s own premises offers no more room for special revelation and the doctrine of creation than modernism itself did.

Related Doctrines

References

Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩
Carter, “Creatio ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” chap. 8. ↩
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
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 260. ↩
Boettner, 244. ↩