The Enlightenment and Modernism

The Enlightenment and modernism—spanning the revolutionary and turbulent period from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century in Europe and America—represented a philosophical, intellectual, and religious shift from the historical Christian understanding of faith and reason. While some thinkers have maintained that the Enlightenment and modernism were two separate movements, it may be more accurate to identify modernism as a worldview birthed by the Enlightenment movement, though the two terms may be used interchangeably. Proponents of Enlightenment and modernist ideals pitted science against religion and argued for the primacy of human reason, the inevitability of human progress, and the separation of church and state. They sought freedom from what they saw as the trappings of traditional social ethics, art, music, learning, and faith, advocating a worldview that saw all things existing and prospering apart from God and His special revelation in the Bible. Man, not God, was embraced as the measure of all things.

The Enlightenment (a period sometimes referred to as the “Age of Reason”) produced a number of thinkers who looked to human reason, unaided by divine special revelation, as the highest authority for answering life’s most significant questions and the surest guide for improving human society. The knowledge of truth would come not from God, His works of creation or providence, or His special revelation but through the use of reason and naturalistic methodologies. One of the most significant Enlightenment thinkers, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), encouraged people to think in a manner entirely independent of prior traditions. Other key Enlightenment ideals were developed in the essays of John Locke (1632–1704).

Despite the influence of individual thinkers such as Kant and Locke, the rational questioning of traditional authority, faith, and learning found no unified, monolithic voice. Rather, the Enlightenment produced different emphases depending on the year, location, and specific circumstances. It may be more appropriate to speak of the French Enlightenment or the English Enlightenment, as the movement in the various countries would be marked by watershed moments in their respective histories. Both the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century, for example, were propelled by Enlightenment and modernist ideals, but each revolution took a different turn, with the American Revolution taking on a much more theistic cast than the French Revolution.

Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) “Common Sense,” “Rights of Man,” and “The Age of Reason” and Thomas Jefferson’s (1743–1826) Declaration of Independence are notable representations of Enlightenment ideals. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) championed the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially those of individual liberty, religious toleration, and the free agency of man. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) was an avowed advocate of Enlightenment and modernist thought. In his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), he criticized historical-traditional institutions and religion, aiming to demystify the universe and purge supernatural beliefs that clouded true knowledge and understanding. These articulations would later find a developed naturalistic system of thought in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). The landmark, thirty-five volume Encyclopédie, compiled by Denis Diderot (1713–84), uniquely helped propel Enlightenment thought across Europe and America.

Although Enlightenment thinkers questioned traditional beliefs, many of them did not want to jettison belief in God altogether. Thus, new syncretistic alternatives were proposed that made belief in a certain kind of deity compatible with Enlightenment thought. Especially prominent among these alternatives were deism and (later) theological liberalism. Deism viewed God as a divine “clockmaker” who wound up creation—along with all the laws of nature—only to let it run its own course while He remains disconnected to the events of everyday life. As a rationalistic theology, deism rejected the Bible as the source of divine special revelation and emphasized that all knowledge of God comes solely through rationalism and observation of the natural world. Thomas Jefferson’s revision of the Bible (1820), for example, removed references to the supernatural, to the miraculous, and to Jesus’ divinity.

Theological liberalism, rooted in the German Enlightenment, also sought to “demythologize” the Bible and tone down its overt supernaturalism. Liberal theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) questioned the authenticity of certain biblical texts and emphasized ethics at the expense of doctrinal truths, seeing Jesus merely as a model of Christian character and not as the Savior who gave His life in a substitutionary atonement to redeem sinners. Other groups veered even further away from historical, orthodox Christianity.

In the end, the Enlightenment and modernism suffered from their own over-emphasis upon self-actualized reason. People grew weary of such a narrow understanding of the world and turned to the emotional life. This would result in the Romanticism of the nineteenth century.