5 Enlightenment Figures

What were the hallmarks of the Enlightenment? What impact did it have on the church? Today, Stephen Nichols provides an overview of this philosophical movement and introduces us to five major Enlightenment thinkers.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes In Church History. An Englishman, an American, a Frenchman, a German, and a Scott walk into a library. No, that’s not the beginning of a joke. It is an episode here on 5 Minutes in Church History. These are all five figures of the Enlightenment. The Englishman is John Locke. The American is Thomas Paine. The Frenchman is Jean Jacques Rousseau. The German, well, that has to be Immanuel Kant. And the Scott is none other than David Hume. These were all very significant thinkers that dominated the philosophical, political, cultural, theological conversations of the seventeen hundreds. It began actually in the final decades of the sixteen hundreds with John Locke and goes right on through with the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804. Well, what is the Enlightenment? We talk about it a lot, this moment in the history of ideas. Immanuel Kant actually tackled this question himself with an essay that he titled “What Is Enlightenment?”

In the first sentence, he writes, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” He’s speaking of there of transitioning from being a minor to adult. In the United States, the magic age is eighteen. Prior to eighteen, you’re a minor, but at eighteen, you have a new legal status. You are an adult, and you are free. Well, Kant goes on to write, “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage, when its cause lies not in lack of reason, but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.” He says, “Have courage to use your own reason.” That is the motto of the Enlightenment. So, we see here the themes of the Enlightenment are freedom or the use of reason or the recognition that humanity or cultures are under this tutelage, are being directed how to think. And these figures all in their own way through their books, we’re promoting the idea that we can think through ourselves. We can think through ourselves, through following, not superstition, but by following science.

One of the things that the Enlightenment stressed was that role of science. It saw certain institutions, whether those institutions were the Monarchy or the Church, that were institutions that held people in check and held individuals in check. And so, they promoted the coming out from those institutions. You see it as the Enlightenment is a time of revolution. There was the bloodless revolution in England. There was the not-so-bloodless, at-all-bloodless revolution in France, and then, of course, there was the revolution in America, which also came at the cost of a war. But as these revolutions were overthrowing these Monarchies and introducing Republican forms of governments and even Democracies, it was aim also taken at the Church and even aim taken at theology. In the university through the ancient world from Augustine on and the Medieval universities, it was said that theology is the queen of the sciences, which is to say that theology ruled the academic roost, but with the Enlightenment, that got overturned, and the heart sciences were actually the queen of the sciences in the university.

Well, theology, it all of a sudden became religion, which was less focused on God’s revelation and more focused on human ideas about the divine. And religion was relegated to lower rungs on the ladder. Divinity schools or seminaries were lesser still. The Enlightenment replaced classical theism with deism at best and rationalism at worst. One of my favorite books by Dr. Sproul is The Consequences of Ideas. And a very crucial idea is the Enlightenment and the ideas that the Enlightenment spawned. For us to understand Church history since the Enlightenment or theology or the Church, we really do need to be paying attention to the Enlightenment and these five thinkers. And there you have it, and I’m Steve Nichols. Thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.