Four waves of religious rationalism
The rationalist attitude quickly spread, its advance forming several waves of general interest and influence. The first wave occurred in England in the form of Deism. Deists accepted the existence of God but spurned supernatural revelation. The earliest member of this school, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), held that a just God would not reveal himself to a part of his creation only and that the true religion is thus a universal one, which achieves its knowledge of God through common reason. The Deistic philosopher John Toland (1670–1722), in his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), sought to show that “there is nothing in the Gospels contrary to reason, nor above it”; any doctrine that is really above reason would be meaningless to humans. Attacking revelation, the freethinking polemicist Anthony Collins (1676–1729) maintained that the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) failed of fulfillment; and the religious controversialist Thomas Woolston (1670–1733) urged that the New Testament miracles, as recorded, are incredible. Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), most learned of the English Deists, argued that the essential part of Christianity is its ethics, which, being clearly apparent to natural reason, leaves revelation superfluous. Thus the Deists, professing for the most part to be religious men themselves, did much to reconcile their public to the free play of ideas in religion.
The second wave of religious rationalism, less moderate in tone and consequences, was French. This wave, reflecting an engagement with the problem of natural evil, involved a decay in the natural theology of Deism such that it merged eventually with the stream that led to materialistic atheism. Its moving spirit was Voltaire (1694–1778), who had been impressed by some of the Deists during a stay in England. Like them, he thought that a rational person would believe in God but not in supernatural inspiration. Hardly a profound philosopher, he was a brilliant journalist, clever and humorous in argument, devastating in satire, and warm in human sympathies. In his Candide and in many other writings, he poured irreverent ridicule on the Christian scheme of salvation as incoherent and on the church hierarchy as cruel and oppressive. In these attitudes he had the support of Denis Diderot (1713–84), editor of the most widely read encyclopaedia that had appeared in Europe. The rationalism of these men and their followers, directed against both the religious and the political traditions of their time, did much to prepare the ground for the explosive French Revolution.
The next wave of religious rationalism occurred in Germany under the influence of Hegel, who held that a religious creed is a halfway house on the road to a mature philosophy, the product of a reason that is still under the sway of feeling and imagination. This idea was taken up and applied with learning and acuteness to the origins of Christianity by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), who published in 1835, at the age of 27, a remarkable and influential three-volume work, Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, 1846). Relying largely on internal inconsistencies in the Synoptic Gospels, Strauss undertook to prove these books to be unacceptable as revelation and unsatisfactory as history. He then sought to show how an imaginative people innocent of either history or science, convinced that a messiah would appear, and deeply moved by a unique moral genius, inevitably wove myths about his birth and death, his miracles, and his divine communings.
Strauss’s thought as it affected religion was continued by the philosophical historian Ernest Renan (1823–92) and as it affected philosophy by the humanist Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) of the Hegelian left. Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863; Life of Jesus) did for France what Strauss’s book had done for Germany, though the two differed greatly in character. Whereas Strauss’s work had been an intellectual exercise in destructive criticism, Renan’s was an attempt to reconstruct the mind of Jesus as a wholly human person—a feat of imagination, performed with a disarming admiration and even reverence for its subject and with a felicity of style that gave it a large and lasting audience. Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums (1841; Essence of Christianity) applied the myth theory even to belief in the existence of God, holding that “man makes God in his own image.”
The fourth wave occurred in Victorian England, following the publication in 1859 of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1809–82). This book was taken as a challenge to the authority of Scripture because there was a clear inconsistency between the Genesis account of creation and the biological account of humans’ slow emergence from lower forms of life. The battle raged with bitterness for several decades but died away as the theory of evolution gained more general acceptance.