Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that made autonomous human reason, rather than special revelation, the final judge of religious truth. Its earliest and most consequential theological expression was English deism: the claim that reason and “natural religion” alone were sufficient, with no need for the Bible’s own claim to reveal God. Historically, the movement coincided with a marked decline of confessional Reformed theology across Britain and the Continent, met by a body of apologetic response and, later, by evangelical revival.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates the Enlightenment’s high-water mark and names no such controversy directly, but its opening chapter states the position the movement’s central claim runs against. 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 The Enlightenment’s claim that reason unaided by special revelation is sufficient for religious truth is precisely what these two paragraphs deny.

Historical Development

English deism supplied the Enlightenment’s opening theological move. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), in De Veritate, reduced the essence of all religion, Christianity included, to five bare truths: that God exists, that he ought to be worshiped, that worship must lead to virtue, that people must repent of sin, and that a future state rewards and punishes human deeds.¹ From there deism mounted a direct attack on revelation itself. John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) made reason the judge of what revelation could be accepted; John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) argued that Christianity contains nothing above reason as well as nothing against it; Anthony Collins’s Discourse on Freethinking (1713) urged unbelieving free inquiry; Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730) set revelation aside altogether on the claim that natural theology already sufficed. The trajectory ended in skepticism with Henry Dodwell’s Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742) and, more thoroughly, with David Hume’s Philosophical Essays (1748), Natural History of Religion (1757), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776).¹

The theological cost was real. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Reformed theology had declined across Britain and the Continent as deism and rationalism gained ground, often advertised as a more “biblical” theology in Remonstrant and Socinian dress alike. In the Netherlands, the once-vigorous Reformed Scholastic tradition produced mainly historical and descriptive multivolume works, such as Bernhardus de Moor’s Commentarius perpetuus in Marckii Compendium (1761-71) and Campegius Vitringa’s Doctrina Christianae Religionis (1761), rather than fresh confessional argument; Alexander Comrie (1706-74) stood out as a vigorous exception. English theologians responded to deism by concentrating on apologetic questions of predictive prophecy, miracles, and revelation, culminating in William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802), works Bavinck himself classes as “important, if rationalist,” for defending the faith on largely evidentialist grounds. In Scotland, Reformed dogmatic theology stayed comparatively vigorous, with Thomas Boston’s A Complete Body of Divinity (1773) and the preaching of the Seceder brothers Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, amid the Marrow Controversy sparked by Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity.¹

The reaction, when it came, was not primarily a return to Reformed scholasticism but the international evangelical revival movement known as the Réveil, which opposed both rationalistic deism and a dead confessionalism.¹ In England, the preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the Methodism it produced, individualized the gospel around personal conversion rather than doctrinal system, reshaping English and American Protestantism far beyond the eighteenth century itself; the nineteenth century’s further turn toward Continental theological modernism is a separate development, covered at Modernism.¹

Objections and Responses

The Enlightenment’s core claim is that autonomous reason, without special revelation, suffices for religious truth. Bavinck grants that Scripture itself does not argue for God’s existence but simply speaks with divine authority (“Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?” Isa. 40:26), and that Christian theology has always accepted some support from natural argument, judged within the doctrine of faith rather than as its foundation. On that basis he distinguishes two very different uses of natural theology: “Christian conviction about what can be known about God apart from special revelation is a valid natural theology,” but “when this natural theology stands on its own, and in a self-sufficient and rationalistic fashion sets aside the need for special revelation, it is an invalid and impious activity.”⁴ The Enlightenment deists took the second course, treating what reason could establish on its own as the whole of acceptable religion rather than as a subordinate support for revealed truth.

A related objection holds that Enlightenment-era criticism left theistic argument itself untenable. Bavinck concedes real damage here: under Hume’s and Kant’s critique, the classical ontological and teleological proofs for God’s existence “have had a difficult time,” though he still judges the cosmological argument’s basic causal reasoning “perfectly legitimate” on its own terms.⁴ The apologetic response the Enlightenment itself provoked, chiefly Paley’s evidentialist defenses of Christianity, met the challenge on its own rationalist ground rather than by returning to revelation’s own claim to authority, which is one reason Bavinck calls that response “rationalist” even while crediting it as an important defense of the faith.¹

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
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. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩ ↩²