How the Reformation Undermined Orthodoxy
Jonathan Rowe on Feb 11th 2007
When debating religion and culture I often hear it claimed by those who laud the religious roots of the West over the secular ones that the Reformation is responsible for the Enlightenment. There are many kernels of truth to this claim. However, one important kernel that few appreciate is how the Reformation in paving the way for Enlightenment ultimately undermined the tenets of Christian orthodoxy and historic Christianity itself.
This is one message I get from an excerpt of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity. Hatch is, by the way, president of Wake Forest University and one of the premier scholars of Religion and the Founding Era.
We see in the writings of our key Founding Fathers support for the Protestant Reformation. However, they also supported Enlightenment and the notion that religion needed to further reform to conform to the tenets of Enlightenment. As George Washington wrote: “I was in hopes, that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far, that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of Society.”
Hatch’s excerpt shows how the notion of sola scriptura and further reform ultimately resulted in denying historic Christian doctrines. This is notable because many of the ministers that he references who did this happened to be the most influential pro-revolutionary preachers and the ones most likely to capture the minds of our key Founders. They were also theological unitarians and universalists. These figures were the most “Enlightened” preachers. They were essentially preaching “infidelity” from their pulpits. As Hatch writes:
DENYING HISTORIC CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE FROM THE “BIBLE ALONE”
The first Americans to underscore the right of private judgment in handling Scripture were, oddly enough, ministers who opposed the evangelical tenets of the Great Awakening. As New Lights in New England worked to make people more theologically self-conscious, often by rewriting church covenants to include strict doctrinal standards, theological liberals increasingly resisted strict creedal definitions of Christianity. The future president of the United States, John Adams, like many of his generation, came to despise theological argumentation. He reported in his diary in 1756,
“Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and the whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?” [6]
To gain leverage against the entrenched Calvinism of the Great Awakening theological liberals redoubled their appeal to depend on the Scriptures alone. “Why may not I go to the Bible and learn the doctrines of Christianity as well as the Assembly of Divines?” the prominent Boston clergyman Jeremy Belknap asked in 1784. Simeon Howard, a more liberal minister, exhorted his colleagues to “keep close to the Bible” and to “avoid metaphysical additions.” He also advised clergyman to “lay aside all attachment to human systems, all partiality to names, councils and churches, and honestly inquire, ‘what saith the scriptures.’” [7]
Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church for sixty years (1727-1787), is the most prominent example of an exclusive appeal to Biblical authority in order to unravel theological orthodoxy. Chauncy was persuaded to emphasize Bible study by reading the works of English divines, such as Samuel Clarke’s The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712) and John Taylor’s The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (London, 1740). Both authors used a “free, impartial and diligent” method of examining Scripture to JETTISON, respectively, the doctrines of the Trinity and of Original Sin. [8]
During the 1750s, after the Great Awakening, Charles Chauncy spent seven years engaged in the approach to Bible study expounded by these English authors. In the spring of 1754 he wrote to a friend,
“I have made the Scriptures my sole study for about two years; and I think I have attained to a clearer understanding of them than I ever had before.”
His studies led him to draft a lengthy manuscript in which he REJECTED the idea of eternal punishment and embraced universalism. He kept this work in his desk for over a quarter-century, its conclusions, he confessed, too controversial “to admit of publication in this country.” He was nearly eighty when he finally allowed a London publisher in 1784 to print The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations…or, the Salvation of All Men. To justify his conclusions, Chauncy relied on the biblical force of his argument, “a long and diligent comparing of Scripture with Scripture.” He explained to Ezra Stiles, “The whole is written from the Scripture account of the thing and not from any human scheme.” This unorthodox biblicist would have been gratified indeed by the reaction of one minister who, finding the book’s arguments convincing, wrote,
“He has placed many texts and passages of Scripture in a light altogether new to me, and I cannot help thinking his system not only rational, but Scriptural.” [9]
Well into the nineteenth century, rationalistic Christians — many of them Unitarians and Universalists — argued against evangelical orthodoxy by appealing to the Bible. Unitarian Noah Worcester’s arguments were typical. He challenged people to think for themselves, to slough off a “passive state of mind” that deferred to great names in theology. “The Scriptures,” he declared, “were designed for the great mass of mankind and are in general adapted to their capacities.”
Worcester assumed that mysteries such as the Trinity would be discarded by a disbelieving public once people learned to explore the Bible for themselves. He recounted his Unitarian conversion in a book appropriately entitled Bible News of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Concord, NH, 1810). [10] In the same vein, Charles Beecher defended his rejection of his father Lyman’s orthodoxy by renouncing “creed-power” and raising the banner of “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.” [11] By the 1840s, however, when Charles Beecher had moved beyond the pale of orthodoxy, a different and decidedly more evangelical notion of biblicism had taken root within American culture.
Read the whole thing here.
Filed in The Belfry
Jonathan,
Great Point! I appreciated you bringing this up, and is an important consideration when reviewing a lot of the American antebellum religious thought. It should be emphasized.
My pleasure!!!
Unquestionably, the Reformation refocused “authority” from the Church’s hierarchy to the individual believer, who then became his own authority based on his own personal interpretation based on a part of the Church’s patrimony, the scriptures. This change caused several factors of the Enlightenment to magnify (separate from the Enlightenment itself).
The first is a pluralistic attitude toward Christian truths and values, which required an acceptance of some diversity within the Christian tradition. The second was individual autonomy in matters of personal discretion, including self-rule and free-exchange, that required diversity in Christian principles and practice. The third was a rejection of all tyrannical authorities, whether secular or sacred, replaced by a free society, where individuals were left to make their own decisions without oversight by others.
These and other changes wrought by the Reformation of traditional Christianity were compatible with those wrought by the Enlightenment philosophes. But most of the major Enlightenment figures were outside Christianity altogether. Locke remained a titular Christian, but not Kant, Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and most others. In the American colonies, a similar diversity of Protestant autonomy coupled with Enlightenment autonomy enabled the latter to prevail over the former, with the proviso that the “exercise of religion” was left to individuals to choose for themselves, not for the State to impose a particular variety of a particular Reformed Christianity.
At the founding, no one species of Christianity could be imposed as the national religion, so none were permitted to do so. This satisfied the disparate parochial interests by denying all of them say over any other. But ever since, a variety of different Protestant interests have successfully tried to codify its particular values in the social fabric and they generally succeeded, to wit State marriages, criminalization of homosexuality, the control of liquor sales, the ban of certain drugs, closing of commerce on Sundays and Christmas, banning contraception and abortion, etc.
But most of the Enlightenment thinkers were not Christians at all. Their chance meeting with Christian pluralism at the founding was always a compromise of mutual interests serving a limited goal by denying any one parochial interest hegemony over any other. Sadly, the Enlightenment has been repeatedly eclipsed by religious beliefs and practices, from banning Darwin to imposing segregation, depending on which Christian variety was then prevalent. Today, it is the Evangelical’s efforts at hegemony that dominates these parochial interests. Religious beliefs always seem to require a State interest, whether Judaism, Christianity, or even Islam, even though the Enlightenment thought exactly the opposite. Once again, the Enlightenment has lost to religious hegemonies despite every effort to avoid them.
Actually, a book on relevant to this discussion is Rowan Williams Arius. In this his thesis is that the Athanasius/Arius conflict was not just about the theology but a conflict of ecclessial and doctrinal authority. It (according to Williams) was a conflict between the small group with a charismatic leader (Arius in this case) vs the hierarchy (Bishop Athanasius). In that conflict the hierarchy one. In the Reformation (especially in the US) the small group is ascendant. I think similarities between the small vs large conflict during the 4th century and the Reformation exist and might be relevant (although this repetition of history was almost certainly not something that the US Founders were aware, then again, they weren’t theologians).
The Arian Dispute was settled, as all historical Christian disputes were settled, by the Episcopacy, which is normative for historical Christianity. In traditional Christianity, the bishop is the overseer and pastoral shepherd who has the authority to determine authentic teachings and practices, especially when the bishops act collegially in an ecumenical council (see Acts 15 for its biblical foundations). The Reformation replaced the Episcopacy with the Bible and made the individual believer his own sole authority. Besides violating biblical norms, which states that the Church is the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim 3:16), while scriptures are for edification, it subverted the established hierarchical order. (Remember, most kings had to have a bishop’s approval.)
Making the individual the final arbiter of truth comports with the Enlightenment’s self-rule and democracy. In many aspects, the Reformation gave birth to the Enlightenment’s widespread popularity, which then largely rejected religion by its appeal to reason, science, and autonomy, but tolerated religion on the margins (tolerance is a liberal principle). Religion rejects the Enlightenment for this very reason, because its hegemony is diminished or extinguished. Read Pope Pius XIII’s encyclical on this very subject, which plainly claims that “modernity” (read: Enlightenment) is a direct threat to religion. It was. Religion trumped the Enlightenment, and we now have various strengths of a moderate theocracy.
Great comments. I knew when writing this “The Gay Species” would have something to say.
Hi Jon,
I was just rereading in “The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit,” by Fred Gladstone Bratton, where he spoke of the relationship of the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment. A few lines…”From the vantage-point of the twentieth century the Renaissance-Reformation can best be viewed as a transition; not a complete or unified movement, but a vestibule from one world to another…in spite of Luther’s distrust of reason and the ‘continuance of revelation,’ the Reformation opened the way for the Enlightenment….In spite of its half-way measures and its excesses of violence and intolerance, the Reformation marked the birth of a new authorityin religion, that of individual thought and private judgment…The Renaissance-Reformation contained both medieval and modern elements; it exhibited authoritarian as well as free concepts. It remained for later awakenings to clarify and extend the underlying principles of this epoch…to utilize the concept of freedom and with it to fashion modern democracy.” He then goes on to talk about Voltaire, Locke, Newton, Hume, Paine, Chauncey, Franklin, Priestley, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, etc.
What I’ve gotten most from this rereading was that the seeds of the Enlightenment were both spiritual and intellectual, both of the “common man” or peasantry (especially in its Anabaptist beginnings) and from the centers of higher learning. I’m still intrigued at how this broad liberal/democratic movement of the mind and heart appears to have come together in the rationalistic radical-Reformation Christianity of the Socinians from the 1500’s through the 1600’s, and to what extent people like Locke, Newton, Adams and Jefferson were influenced by this early movement of proto-Unitarians. They were all very familiar with the Socinians and their many publications.
[...] It could be sola-scriptura. However, 1) liberal Protestants like the America’s Founders rejected sola-scriptura. And 2) liberal Protestants of the Founding era used sola-scriptura to reject Trinitarian orthodoxy. In The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch describes Charles Chauncy, one of the most influential preachers who argued on behalf of the American Revolution: Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church for sixty years (1727-1787), is the most prominent example of an exclusive appeal to Biblical authority in order to unravel theological orthodoxy. Chauncy was persuaded to emphasize Bible study by reading the works of English divines, such as Samuel Clarke’s The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712) and John Taylor’s The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (London, 1740). Both authors used a “free, impartial and diligent” method of examining Scripture to JETTISON, respectively, the doctrines of the Trinity and of Original Sin. [8] [...]