This is lecture 22, the great divide, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. As you know, I attempt to begin each class with a prayer from an appropriate person that I'm going to talk about in that lecture. But it's very, very difficult to find a prayer that I could actually pray from one of the Enlightenment leaders or one of the Romantics. So I'm going to pray a prayer from a very orthodox Christian. You'll be relieved to know that. A man who grew up in the reformed tradition but was greatly influenced by piotism, which is the topic that we will look at next time. Gerhard Kierstigen. His prayer is a prayer that is appropriate for this lecture because he lived during the time when so much of what I'm going to talk about today took place. And also the content of this prayer is appropriate as this man prayed for wisdom and guidance and for God's blessing as he and other Christians face the challenges of their time. And certainly we can join in the prayer from Gerhard Kierstigen as we face the challenges of our time. Let us pray. O Prince of life, teach us to stand more boldly on your side. To face the world and all our adversaries more courageously and not to let ourselves be dismayed by any storm of temptation. May our eyes be steadfastly fixed on you in fearless faith. May we trust you with perfect confidence that you will keep us, save us and bring us through by the power of your grace and the riches of your mercy. Amen. This lecture we come to what CS Lewis called the Great Divide. Certainly it's a great divide in history and Western history and it's a great divide in church history as well because the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment and Romanicism are still with us. And from this point on as we study church history we have to be aware of the various new ideas and new forces that the Christian church in one way or another attempted to cope with. Some of those attempts were more successful than others but as we make this transition we'll focus for the next few minutes on this topic, the Great Divide. The Great Divide in church history is not the 16th century reformation that was a great divide and it divided Christians into Catholics and Protestants and Protestants into reform and Lutherans and Anglicans and Anababdas and others. But the Great Divide comes in the 18th century in the Enlightenment as it's usually called although I've noticed that Catholic apologists and philosopher Peter Creeft keep referring to it as the Great Darkness. That was followed by Romanicism and will attempt to get some understanding of these two movements today. These movements have been so pervasive in Western cultural thought that an author being interviewed on the Mars Hill tape series recently made this statement. We are all born in the Enlightenment and bred in Romanicism and what I'd like to do for the next few minutes is to try to understand what he means by that statement. We are all born in the Enlightenment and bred in Romanicism. We'll look first at the Enlightenment and I'd like to show you some pictures of Enlightenment figures beginning with Voltaire, perhaps the most famous of the French Enlightenment figures. This is Voltaire as an old man and if you look closely you'll notice that he's smiling. Another French Enlightenment leader was Diderot of the Encyclopedia thing and if you will look at Diderot you'll see that he is smiling. Another Enlightenment leader, Thomas Jefferson the American president and he too is smiling. Kenneth Clark in his book Civilization noted the fact that number of the Enlightenment heroes are depicted in art as smiling and in Clark's book he talks about the smile of reason. Why are these people smiling? Well they're smiling because they think that they and others like them are on to the answer at last to human life and that all of that will be solved every problem of human life will be solved as mankind now uses his reason to solve the problems of this world. The promise of science comes very early and very high on the list of the important uses of reason marked by the leaders of the Enlightenment. We could talk about many scientists, Isaac Newton of course is one of the most prominent of the scientists who's worked led into the Enlightenment. Newton was born in 1642 and died in 1727 and something of the impact of the discoveries of Newton is felt when we read the words of the poet Alexander Pope nature and nature's laws lay hidden night God said that Newton be and all was white. And so we were on the way in the Western world at least people thought we were on the way to solutions through science to the technological age with all its accomplishments and blessings and certainly there have been many of those so I don't want to give the impression in this lecture that I'm down on the Enlightenment in everything that it accomplished much of the progress of humanity and the blessings that we enjoy in the modern world. We've come from science and the Enlightenment but along with all of that certainly have come to setbacks and disappointments. As the Jewish writer Taim Potak put it, there's 300 years of modern paganism or secular humanism is probably the most creative, the most liberated, the wealthiest, the most dehumanizing and the most murderous civilization in the history. The history of our species, along with the promise of science there was the progress of philosophy. Philosophy began to emerge at this time as a separate discipline from theology. We went talk much about philosophy before this except to mention the Aristotelian philosophy which really was a kind of handmade to theology and before that plateenism, later Neil plateenism, all of these philosophies were imported in the history of the church but they went along with theology in one way or another. But now philosophy begins to emerge as something in its own right. There were two approaches, two philosophy that came out of the Enlightenment, two quite different approaches, one that marked philosophical thought more on the continent and the other philosophical thought more in the British islands. The first was the rationalism of Descartes. You know that Descartes attempted to start with the human mind and then reason everything out. Actually we could say Descartes began not with the human mind but with his own mind which was very fine mind and he was able to produce some rather impressive ideas by doing what he claimed to be doing it. Doing it at least most people thought that he was doing that and that is beginning just with what he could think and doubting everything that he could doubt to get down to the really bare rock of reality and then think his way to guide and to the external world. It was an impressive accomplishment but the British were not altogether impressed. Lord Bacon said that Descartes was like a spider producing cobwebs out of his own existence. The hard-headed British approach was different. The empiricism of John Locke was many ways a kind of antithesis to the rationalism of Descartes. Rather than beginning with the human mind the empiricism began with the external world and the human mind was simply that which would observe, understand and organize the data that would come to it from the external world. So the empiricism is not so much the thinker as the investigator receiving and organizing the truth as he understood it by experiment. Now those are certainly different approaches. One man with his eyes closed is thinking how the truth, the other man the empiricist with his eyes wide open is looking through a microscope or looking through a telescope and trying to discover the real stuff of reality through his empirical investigation. But in one sense it comes down to the same thing doesn't it and that is that the growing autonomy of human reason is emerging whether you're thinking yourself or doing the organizing of the raw data of creation. There is a new focus in philosophy and that is the human person, the human rationality becomes more and more supreme in determining what people believe is no longer the Bible. Now I should say, probably you are wondering why I haven't said this sooner, should say that the early scientists particularly were not men who lack faith in God as a Newton was a devout Christian who spent a great deal of time studying his Bible and writing commentaries on books like Daniel. The question is which puzzles Lord Clark in his book civilization as to why such a brilliant man who could have spent time doing something more important would waste so much of it studying the Bible. Newton realized that in his scientific work as he said he was thinking God's thoughts after him he began his work in science with the prayer that God would enable him to think God's thoughts after him. He saw no clash or no problem between Bible study and scientific investigation the two were one part of his life. But the doxological science of Newton has sometimes been called soon gave way to humanistic secular science or to use the language of Francis Schaeffer modern science which was not by any means anti-Christian but built on a Christian base became modern modern science. And that's when we have the problem in the beginning of what is sometimes called the battle between science and the Bible. All of this in the Enlightenment promise of science and the progress of philosophy led to the rise of rational religion did not lead immediately to agnosticism or certainly not to atheism in most people. But to a new way of conceiving the Christian faith John Locke wrote a book in 1695 which became the theme of the Enlightenment on its religious side for at least a hundred years the reasonableness of Christianity. And book after book attempted to set forth the fact that the Christian faith makes sense it is a reasonable and rational faith the mysteries began to evaporate and the Christian faith began to look more like an Enlightenment philosophy. The theme of that new Christianity was the centrality of morality. You have the reasonableness of Christianity even the doctrine of the Trinity was explained in a way that made it seem reasonable at least to some people. Although other people said they never doubted the doctrine of the Trinity until the rationalist tried to explain it and then it was impossible to understand. But the centrality of morality ethics began to move to the fore not so much the mysteries of the Trinity or the incarnation or the atonement but how we should live and what we should do. Matthew Tindall found ethics at the center of Christianity in his book Christianity as old as creation and Thomas Jefferson found it in the life in teachings of Jesus Christ which is his revised version of the New Testament the life of Christ shorn of all of the miracles. All of this leads to a new form of religion that we call deism. God is still there but God is the great creator God who started it all. And in some vague and distant sense rules over it but basically by allowing the laws that he put into operation to function without interference he is indeed the great geometrician as someone called him at that time. The promise of science and the progress of philosophy and the rise of rational religion seemed to promise that the future of Christianity would be in the direction of deism. But those smiles began to give way eventually to what I call the frown of reason. Some people were not too sure that all of this was going to work the way that the rationalist had thought that it would work. One was David Hume. Hume was by no means an orthodox Christian in fact quite an enemy of Christianity and particularly of the miracles but this 18th century Scotsman argued that you really can't trust your impressions. Your senses what goes on inside the mind may not exactly correspond to what you think is out there so there's a big gap between what is out there and what you think is out there. That was a problem to Christianity but it was really a problem to deism as well maybe more so to deism because of the confidence that the deists had in their own rational religion. But if you can't be sure that your mind is overcoming the barrier between what's inside and what's outside and rational religion doesn't seem to be on such a strong basis anymore. Hume's fellow Scots did notice that when David Hume walked along the streets of Edinburgh just like anybody else he did duck when a low tree lamb was across the sidewalk even though he was teaching that you really can't know whether anything is out there or not the way you think it is. And Hume's fellow Scott Thomas Reed developed the Scottish sense philosophy or Scottish sense realism as an answer to the skepticism of David Hume's philosophy. But after Hume people were not so confident and then lessing got whole lessing came along and thought that you can't trust history. This is getting very serious now. The big ugly ditch of lessing was placed between what we know now and what we read about the past. Lessing said a report of the past the accidental report of history is not the same thing is what happened. An account of America is not America. The Bible telling about prophecy is not prophecy and so there is the added problem of understanding what has happened in the past and the great ugly ditch that stands between us today and everything that is taken place in the past. And even Voltaire who was so optimistic early on that rationality would bring an answer to Hume's life that Christianity had failed to provide even Voltaire began to have second thoughts about whether this world is indeed the best of all possible worlds. His novel can deed or optimism sets that out. Voltaire was stunned by the devastation of an earthquake in Lisbon and after that the world and God did not appear to him so rational. But despite these checks and questions that some people were asking, enlightenment was here to stay. Another movement grew up alongside of it. I used to think of Romanicism as a rejection of the enlightenment as a kind of competing movement with the romantic heart versus the enlightenment head. And the romantic artist versus the enlightenment scientist. And there is something to that but I now think of these movements I think more accurately is parallel movements different but also a light in some ways. Remember the quotation that I began with were all born in the enlightenment in bread and Romanicism if that's true then Western people have an interest in both of these movements and are affected by both. The defining moment of romanticism came when Jean-Jacques Rousseau was sitting on island in a lake and felt himself to be one with nature. Some sort of mystical experience that he had there that brought him he thought in line with nature, a curious discovery to have been made in the middle of the age of reason Kenneth Clark says because Rousseau was saying in a fact I feel therefore I am. Let me sketch out the romantic creed, the importance of feelings. In Gertie's spouse you have feeling is all in all you can even call it God. Now the center is in human emotion or feeling not so much not at all in the human mind as in the enlightenment. Another part of the romantic creed is the sanctity of nature, the romantic poet Wordsworth speaks of the divinity of nature so that God is viewed as nature in a pantheistic direction. If the enlightenment leads in a deistic direction to a distant creator God, the great geometrician pantheism is the direction of romanticism and the role of the artist, not the scientist or the philosopher but is the artist who is able to mediate the truth of life to the rest of us, the artist as an insurgent. He inspired a true, romantic religion found expression in a number of important sources. There was the rational romantic philosophy of a manual Kant religion within the limits of reason alone is his book which focus is not simply on it. There was an enlightenment reason but romantic attitudes as well and romantic religion also found an important expression in the inner religion of Friedrich Schlimacher with his feeling of absolute dependence. Schlimacher taught that our understanding of God and the gospel doesn't come from our minds thinking it out nor does it come from revelation reading about it in the Bible but it comes from an inner feeling of absolute dependence as we find ourselves dependent upon God and we have this feeling. People have puzzled ever since as to what exactly that feeling really means and somebody perhaps not to kindly said in Schlimacher's religion a dog would be the best Christian who has feeling of absolute dependence upon his master. But Schlimacher did turn the corner in many ways in theology so that after Schlimacher's we talk about theology there's going to be a great deal more subjective understanding of Christian theology, how it impacts me, how I feel, how I think. Not so much now thus that the Lord or the Bible says which we've been hearing from the reformers and the Protestant Orthodox but I think I feel I believe which becomes the focus of theology modern theology after the time of Schlimacher. And romantic religion finds another expression in the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson with his rejection of Orthodox and even eventually unitarian theology or the fire within his inner inspiration and belief and doctrine. Well we are all born in the Enlightenment and bred in Romanticism. I think what that means is that since the 18th century Western man and Western woman has an Enlightenment mind and a romantic heart. Until we are brought under the control of Jesus Christ so that our minds and our hearts are now given to him we have this split personality with an Enlightenment mind and a romantic heart. The Enlightenment mind means that we believe people believe that we can solve problems, we can find an answer eventually to everything. Problems are there to be solved and we've succeeded in solving so many of them that at least for a while there was some hope that we could solve all of them. Francis Shaper puts it this way, the Enlightenment mentality expresses itself something like this, it can be done, give me until tomorrow which means that sooner or later we will find the answers to all the problems of life. But of course in our time now there are some signs that we are coming to the end of that Enlightenment road, end of the modern period, end of that trust in rationalism, into a new period that people are already calling a period of postmodernism. But whatever that means, wherever that's going there's still a great deal of Enlightenment thought that still affects us in our world today, we can do it, just give us time. But along with that there is the romantic heart. You see the Enlightenment doesn't really feed the soul much, it gives the mind something to think about. But sooner or later there's an emptiness in the soul and in the heart. And the Romantics taught us while we're solving problems and thinking great rational thoughts to live life according to our feelings, to our desires, to what we want to do. I was staying with some friends not long ago and they were telling me about their daughter, a little girl or five years old, and one day the mother was correcting the child, telling her what she should do and should not do, and the little girl responded. But I want to obey me, which sounds very much like ex theologian Emberson's maximum obeyed iself, this four or five year old girl did not read Emerson, but there's something there in the heart of all of us and certainly fed by Romanticism, which says the real authentic person is the person that you are and you should obey yourself and express yourself and live for yourself. But by the time we go 100 years, 200 years, certainly 300 years, something has gone horribly wrong with all of this. And the most optimistic rationalist and Romantic must realize that things have not turned out quite the way that mankind had hoped. The Enlightenment Mine has solved some great problems, things that years ago our ancestors would not have believed could have been solved, terms of transportation, medicine, modern computer age. It would stagger the mind of people not too long ago to think that we know and can do the things that we tend to and that we know today. But if the Enlightenment has solved some very big problems, it hasn't solved the biggest problems, they're still with us. And the Romantic heart has proven to be what Isaiah calls the deluded heart as people realize sooner or later that to obey yourself is not a good idea. W.H. Auden, I want to close with this, a poem from W.H. Auden, after all the Romantic said that the artist is the mediator of truth. So let's listen to an artist who certainly understands both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. He wrote a poem at the end of the year 1939, it is in title September 1st, 1939. At the end of what the poem calls a long, dishonest decade, 1930s. Well, let's use it to end this lecture as we come close to the end of this millennium as a kind of last sad word commentary on these developments that I've been talking about today. This is a word that Pascal certainly would have understood because he predicted at the very beginning that it would turn out like this, he saw the way it was going. Here are the words part of the poem, September 1st, 1939 by W.H. Auden faces along the bar, cling to their average day. The lights must never go out, the music must always play. All the conventions conspire to make this fort assume the furniture of home. Last, we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good. Well, that may be the last word I can say on the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but not the last word I want to say about everything, so let me conclude with our usual way. Grassweather's flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. That was impressionistic, wasn't it? I'm sure you've got a lot of questions. I'm not sure I've got a lot of answers, but I can tell you perhaps where to find them. So, was that a transcendentalism? Yes, the career of Emerson, he was a theologian and a pastor. He moved from a congregational trinitarian period to a unitarian period as Oxford, or I'm sorry, Harvard moved from trinitarianism to unitarianism. But then, shocked even his Oxford or Harvard liberal friends by repudiating unitarianism and moving into something that we usually call transcendentalism, so that even unitarianism looked conservative compared to where Emerson ended up. What do I mean by the autonomy of reason? I don't mean that philosophy becomes autonomous in the sense that Platonism and Aristotelianism were not autonomous, but in the history of the Church, the history of Western culture since the time of Constantine, with Christianity being the great integrating factor in culture, philosophy played a secondary role. And it could be used as the medieval theologians did, Aristotelianism was used to support Christianity. So, these philosophies in themselves were autonomous, but the function that they played in history was subordinate to the Christian faith. By the time we come to the Enlightenment now, there's not concern on the part of the philosophers always and increasingly less and less concern to see how this supports Christianity, something different and eventually opposed to Christianity. Something on the development of Romanticism, the early Romantics certainly used the word God a lot, but when you look at what Rousseau means, or Nulvales, or Gerti, or even Wordsworth, their word for God almost evaporates in any kind of traditional sick and beauty, can be nature, it can be one's inner light, so that from the beginning, God becomes a very generalized word and truth or purpose in light, is explained using the word God, but in a very indefinite sort of way. I suppose one way to look at it if the Enlightenment people, the rationalist, the deist, still have God, he's so far off he really doesn't have much to do with us anymore. So rationalists really had a hard time thinking of prayer because they did not think of God as being concerned to hear our prayers and answer them. God was the great watchmaker who made the watch and wound it up and now it's running on its own. God is very far off, but the Romantics, on the other hand, brought God so close and so much a part of their Romantic sensitivity that God disappears within. On the one hand, he's lost without the world, the other hand, he evaporates within the Romantic consciousness within the world. So I don't see either movement, having a good proper understanding of God and then declining from the very beginning, both the Enlightenment and Romanticism had very unorthodox and unchristian views of God. Well that's a good question. How does the Church react to all of this? You know as Descartes is writing and the other scientists, philosophers, are at work, it is the period of the high orthodox that we talked about already, the Protestant scholastics, turning out these huge tomes of light and theology. Now those theologies don't interact very much with this new world, although Gisbertus Voeetius does write about Descartes and Descartes answers Voeetius in a book called A Letter to That Very Famous Man, Gisbertus Voeetius, which is a curious title because most people today have never heard of Voeetius and everybody knows about Descartes. But in those days it showed that this theologian was viewed even by a French philosopher who very much disagreed with him as a great man, a scholarly man. Somebody said that if the scholastics don't do a very good job answering the questions of the philosophers, that these were not the questions of the common man either, which is true. But the question, they became the questions of the sons and the grandsons of the common man, and even the sons and grandsons of the theologians. We know that after France's turret, and there was one more turret in Ingenieva, four generations of turretons, theologians in Ingenieva, Francis, the one we talked about the most, his son, John Alphonse turreton, was something of a liberal, very much influenced by rational thought. He wasn't full-fledged DS, but it wasn't long before the whole Calvinistic tradition is lost in Ingenieva through the impact of enlightenment Christianity on people of those times. I would say that one of the problems that Christianity had in trying to face this, and some of this is in the syllabus, in material that I haven't covered, some books I suggest and other ideas there, but one of the problems was that the major response was to sort of play the Enlightenment game and say, Well, if rationality is the way you're going, let's show how Christianity goes that way too, so there's a kind of rationalizing of orthodoxy, so that it begins to look more like deism, as people try to answer the rationalists and answer the deists, they, perhaps we could say, fight fire with fire. That was not the way Pascal wanted to do it, and that's not the way that a more effective answer could be given to rationalism. William Law, I think, who influenced John Wesley so much, and he's mentioned two in the syllabus, has a better approach, and that is to say that reason, rather than being such a great thing, maybe the problem itself. As we begin to focus on the possibility of creating a rational religion, that becomes an idolatry, and that becomes a problem itself, so we need to go back to a humble acceptance of God's truth, which is not irrational, but certainly in many cases above human understanding. Churches did not do very well with the Enlightenment or Romanticism, Romanticism will influence theology and Christianity, too, as in Schlimacher, so that what comes out the other side is a very much tainted form of Christianity. All of this is important, I think, to alert us to the fact that as we face another paradigm shift, perhaps in Western culture, we need to try to do better. Yes, go on. Yes, I think we will come back to a manual camp later, but his basic thrust, I think, as it affected Christianity, was to agree with others, including David Hume, although he's not going to follow Hume exactly. But he sees the problem between the thing out there and the thing in itself, so he raises a major question as to whether we can really think properly and understand properly about what is exterior to us. Scottish common sense philosophy try to deal with all of these metaphysical heresies by saying, but people do, you know, we do know certain things, we do have certain foundational truths, we do have certain common sense consensus, we can agree on certain things, that there is something out there, there is reality and our minds are made by God who made what's out there, so the two things fit together. And even though we cannot perfectly understand what's out there, we're not deceived when we see something or think something, that may raise some problems to for philosophers and the validity of common sense philosophy has been debated all the way down to the present. But God put the big question mark there as to how much we could really know and tended then to turn inside like the Romantics to find within the place for true religion, not in facts and dogma and information and Bible and creed. But in the inner life, which we have direct access to, okay, one more. Yes, how does the Westminster confession reflect the enlightenment of vice versa? You don't get much in the Westminster confession that indicates that all of this is going on. The Westminster confession is looking to the past of the history we've studied so far in order to summarize and draw off its theological statements, so it doesn't reflect much of what is happening outside Westminster. But having said that, let me just close with this comment, there were several of the Westminster devines who were also founding members of the Royal Society of Science, which was meeting about the same time in London, so there was not necessarily any means an antipathy to the new thought. But it doesn't express itself in terms of the confession itself. God created all things out of nothing in the space of six days, says short of catechism, which is what the Bible says. And any theories on creative days or astronomy or science are just not there. The devines may well have been interested in all this, but they did not feel that a confession was the place fortunately to put scientific theory or philosophical ideas.