The Age of Reason is a free Bible study/Christian history that shows how and why modern Christianity became apostate. |
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Martin Luther (1483-1546) lived in Germany at a time when
nationalism was cresting, and its tide would pick him up and sweep him along
like a piece of flotsam. Like many in his day he was schooled in the new philosophical
method of independent thinking. Luther’s zeal for philosophy is reminiscent of
Augustine’s infatuation with philosophy, and Luther’s fellows at the University
of Erfurt often referred to him with Aristotle’s honorary nickname, “The
Philosopher”, which shows how much Christianity had been leavened in a thousand
years: Liberal philosophy-loving Bible scholars like Philo, Justin, and Origen
had been despised as heretics in the early centuries of Christianity. But when
the Catholic Church built schools all over Europe, liberal scholars like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Peter Abelard began
quoting to their students the works of those long-dead heretics as if they were
authorities whose Enlightened teachings could be used
as doctrinal precedents! This resulted in those old liberals, who’d been
despised and executed by early Christians, being increasingly viewed as
respectable “church fathers” and trustworthy doctrinal experts by modern
Christians! This illustrates the gradual and subtle beginnings of religious
traditions and corrupt doctrines.
Luther had no desire to lead a religious
life, but one day in a frightening thunderstorm he impulsively made a vow to a
dead woman: “Help me, Saint Anne, and I’ll become a monk!” Two weeks later in
preparation for entering the Spartan life of a monastery he sold many of his
possessions including most of his books. Among the few books he kept were his
treasured pagan classics. But remember, even though I’ll continue calling it pagan
philosophy, it was now Christian philosophy. So Luther was keeping his Christian
philosophy books because they would help him as a monk. And, predictably enough
since he was a zealous espouser of Reason, he chose to enter the Augustinian
Order. After a year as a lowly plebe he was promoted to monk, and a year later
was ordained a priest and said his first mass in May of 1507. A year later he
was selected for advanced studies and went to the University of Wittenberg,
which had only been founded six years earlier. There he was taught by
professors who were, like many Germans, fans of the Enlightened English
champion of German independence from the pope, William of Ockham, who lived and
died in Germany.
Martin Luther, too, became a fan of the
excommunicated escaped convict who lived in Germany on the lam. In fact, the
two people who would have the most influence on Luther’s life were Ockham and
Augustine, which contributed to Luther’s also opposing the pope, being
excommunicated, and living on the lam in Germany under the protection of German
nobility. Because both Augustine and Ockham publicly denounced the pagan
philosophers, Luther demonstrated his loyalty by also denouncing them. But
because Luther’s hero, Augustine, used philosophy, and because Saint Aquinas
had made philosophy part of Christianity, Luther, like most Christians today,
may never have realized he was Hellenized. He was in way over his head and was
swept along with the flood of rebellion.
All of the Protestant reformers were Enlightened, even if, like Luther and Augustine, they denied
it. John Calvin, for example, was a dedicated humanist with a strong Roman
Catholic background in philosophy. Ulrich Zwingli, also a reformed Catholic
priest, was a noted humanist who wanted the Protestant Church founded on
democratic principles. Zwingli even paid tribute to the pagan philosophers (and
may even have accepted Dante’s idea that they were too “good” to go to hell) by
saying he’d prefer “the eternal lot of a Socrates [the suicidal homosexual
philosopher] or a Seneca [a suicidal Roman philosopher] than of a pope.” The
Protestant reformers hated Romanism, not philosophic Reason.
When Luther graduated from Wittenberg he
was asked by his professors to fill a teaching vacancy. Young Professor Luther
proved to be more aggressive than his fellow professors, and he became an
outspoken advocate of Thomas Aquinas’ “biblical humanism”, something many were
still hesitant to publicly embrace. He also wanted to implement Ockham’s idea
of eliminating the direct influence of pagan philosophy on Christianity! (Like
I said, he was in over his head.) He adopted Ockham’s “sola Scriptura” slogan,
not realizing his own heavy reliance on Augustine and
Aquinas made the slogan empty. Like many Christians before and since, Luther relied
on the traditions of other Christians, naïvely trusting that the works of those
men were probably based on sola Scriptura. It was a big mistake and would
result in many generations of Christians being led astray.
Luther’s idea of “biblical humanism” was
to study the Bible while also accepting as dogmatic and binding the teachings
of the “old Fathers” (Luther’s term for the Church Fathers), especially St.
Augustine. In reference to his program of biblical humanism Luther wrote, “our theology and that of St. Augustine reign.” As you can
see, “sola Scriptura” was a great slogan but, alas, it was only a slogan.
Father Luther made a trip to visit the
papal see at Rome, and the result was very similar to Father Ockham’s trip to
the papal see at Avignon – he was disgusted. He returned to Wittenberg and in
1517 nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the bulletin-board door of his
church to publicly express his doctrinal differences. If he had
published it in Latin or Greek so only the educated elite could read it, or
done anything but let the ignorant masses know about it, there would have been
no trouble. But he went public. And that was the moment Luther unknowingly lost
control of his life.
Father Erasmus (1469-1536) was an
Enlightened Dutch Roman Catholic priest in Luther’s Augustinian Order who
agreed with Luther and supported his arguments for reforming Roman Catholicism.
Erasmus was an intellectual humanist who hated the corruption in the Church and
quietly and gently espoused the use of the new Rationalism to restore moral and
doctrinal purity to the Church. He said post-Aquinas Christianity had improved,
becoming “a religion of the spirit based on confidence in human Reason.”
But, like many humble intellectuals who also have high character, he naïvely
assumed most men were also of good character, because God created us all in His
image by putting Equal amounts of Natural goodness in each of us so we all
might tune in to His Natural Law. Erasmus therefore believed the Roman Catholic
Church and its doctrines would eventually be reformed from within. And he
thought priests like Luther could be catalysts for this internal reformation.
In order to reach the intellectuals with
his arguments Luther also published a manuscript in Latin. The scholars of
Europe, including the pope, read it and discussed it with others. At this point
there was no real problem. Yes, Luther had publicly posted his Ninety-five
Theses, and, yes, that was a no-no because you were not supposed to expose
the populace to concepts it couldn’t handle because a dim-wit – whether he be a
nobleman or a commoner – armed with a concept he doesn’t understand can be a
dangerous thing. But there was no real problem here, so all the pope did was
benevolently and fatherly instruct Father Luther’s superior to lightly
reprimand this feisty young pup for his indiscretion. As far as the Vatican was
concerned that ended this very minor incident. And in all probability Luther
would have beat on his chest a little bit and groused about it and written one
or two more papers in Latin and then settled down and lived a normal life. But
he had publicly opposed the Vatican with his Ninety-five Theses.
And that had attracted the attention of dim-witted nationalists.
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German Catholics were beginning to feel
different from their Italian Catholic masters as the appeal of religious and
nationalistic independence grew. Behind the scenes there were German nobles
who, for their own political reasons, decided they could use a bold,
charismatic, and naïvely-idealistic man like Martin Luther who had delighted
locals with the brazen challenge of his Ninety-five Theses. These
nationalistic nobles pursued Luther with flattery, and they encouraged the
masses to view him as a champion of righteousness. Even the relatively mild
professors at Wittenberg actively rallied behind Luther, and he found himself
to be somewhat of a celebrity. His celebrity and his natural tendency to use
bluster in an attempt to save face when reprimanded caused a couple of meetings
with Church officials to go badly. All the officials wanted to do was lightly
reprimand him, but when Luther reacted with cocky defiance the officials were
indignant at the flagrant disrespect and insubordination with which he treated
people who were just trying to do their jobs by quieting down a situation that
was rapidly becoming a public spectacle. The issue for the Church now became
Luther’s defiant and sinful treatment of the very Church authorities to whom
he’d made vows of submission and obedience before God (Ec
5:4,5).
Seeing that things weren’t going well for
him in the Church, and since his Latin manuscript was being met with silence,
Luther, empowered by the nobles and by the masses, went on the offensive by
making his feud very public. He published numerous tracts in German
in order to rally the masses. And Luther was no dummy; he knew the masses of pewsters didn’t care about doctrine so he appealed to their
nationalism and their greed. He wrote that the Italian hierarchy in Rome
was selling indulgences, relics, etc., and thereby lining Italian
pockets with German money. His “them vs. us” theme nicely fit the
nationalistic mood. Because they were incapable of dealing with words and
concepts and doctrine, the masses failed to notice when Luther’s tracts, which
were passed out by the thousands, referred to the economic issues by
saying, “We here come to the heart of the matter”, that he was
contradicting the doctrinal emphasis of his Ninety-five Theses.
Another of Luther’s tracts, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German
Nation, was wandering and poorly written but it did pit “the German people”
against “Rome”, and it did use the same philosophy Ockham used in defense of
Emperor Louis IV to justify “the secular arm” of the Church rising against “the
spiritual arm” whenever the secular arm thought it appropriate. It was very
well received. Another of his writings even called upon the ecclesiastical
“spiritual arm” to start a revolution in the Church, which shocked, offended,
and alienated many clerics like Erasmus who had previously supported Luther but
now properly viewed him as a rabble-rousing advocate of rebellion against
authority just like Lucifer. For its part the Vatican, now that Luther had
publicly defied and attacked the authority of his superiors, had no alternative
but to respond in the same way God did when His subordinate, Lucifer, rose in
rebellion against His authority – it excommunicated him.
Luther
was summoned before Church officials at the 1521 Imperial Diet, which was
convened by the young new emperor, Charles V, at Worms. Luther was escorted and
protected by a large cavalcade of German knights all the way to Worms. It was a
huge spectacle with throngs of people cheering Luther. Luther and the church
officials argued in Latin, therefore the massed spectators couldn’t understand
a word. But that turned out to be to Luther’s advantage: The language barrier
kept the masses from understanding how badly the proceedings went for the
thirty-six year old rogue priest who had no way to counter the Church
officials’ Scriptural and legal arguments against both his blatant disrespect
for authority and his public attempts to foment rebellion. As a practical
matter, however, the arguments were a charade; neither the nationalistic nobles
nor the masses were there to listen with keen discernment to discussions about
Biblical and legal concepts and doctrines like authority and rebellion – they
were there to take a stand against their church no matter what happened to
Luther.
As the proceedings drew to a close Luther
was extremely frustrated: His gut told him the “just cause” theory of the Greek
philosophers justified his rebellion. And yet these smug clerics had just used
the Bible and Church and civil law – none of which he thought applied in his
case – to humiliate him like a little schoolboy. His undisciplined hot temper
and his frustration caused Luther to lose control of himself:
He began hysterically screaming at the officials at the top of his lungs with
red-faced apoplectic anger. And he did something interesting; he switched to
German so the people would understand. One of his supporters also began
yelling, and order ended. An early Protestant historian, in an effort to make a
hero out of a screaming hysterical loser, and to use
literary whitewash to create a dramatic and principled beginning to the
Protestant Rebellion, portrayed Luther as proudly declaring with calm,
disciplined resolve: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” It is now known to be a
fabrication – Luther said no such thing.
Appalled and probably somewhat frightened
by the erupting pandemonium, the young emperor quickly terminated the
proceedings, at which point Luther turned and strode toward the cheering
throngs with his arms raised in defiant triumph. Luther was neither a hero nor
a lone warrior taking a stand on sola Scriptura. He was largely a puppet of the
nationalistic nobles who had not escorted him to Worms only to have him
apologize and ask for forgiveness. Luther knew if he did that the very knights
who escorted him would have killed him. In fact, had the emperor not terminated
the proceedings when he did the bloodshed might have started then instead of
later. Yes, it had already been decided that blood was going to flow.
Luther
was now an outlaw. He fled into the protective arms of the nationalist groups and
went into a life of hiding. He lied about his name and told people he was
“Junker Georg”, grew a beard to change his looks, illegally wore the attire of
a knight, and grew very fat. He was shocked and horrified by how quickly the
population became violent revolutionists, and he made
a few hypocritical efforts to tell people rebellion is a sin – just as Erasmus
had been telling him all along. As a result, many of his followers, called Martinians, denounced and ridiculed him and joined other
groups or started their own. Luther’s cries for peace were ignored and the
bloodshed began. Under the leadership of several other Catholic priests who
started their own Protestant denominations, the Protestant Reformation forged
ahead without him.
Luther continued to write and turned out
some pretty good hymns. His writings were later used when a Protestant
denomination was started that used his name. His writings have let us know
that, while he was successful at dodging the law, he couldn’t hide from Satan.
Presumably because Luther’s doctrines were so pure, Satan personally declared
war on this fat outlaw, appeared several times to him
and began to harass him. The Bible tells us Christ’s disciples had trouble
dealing with devils, but Martin Luther wrote that he did not. When Satan
launched a fart at Luther, Martin beat him at his own game by sending him
running “mit einem furz” (with a fart). (Whether it was because Luther’s
considerable girth greatly amplified the sound and frightened the Prince of
Darkness or if his gas terribly offended Satan’s snoot the Protestant leader
didn’t record.) But Satan did not give up easily. And Luther quickly found
himself earnestly contending for the faith – even when Satan began fighting
dirty.
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Modern morality-worshipping Christians
who translated Luther’s accounts of these face-to-face battles with Satan saw
something in Luther’s writings that caused them to react with the cartoonish
absurdity of a woman who sees a mouse – their eyes grew wide and their hands
flew to their faces as they danced on tippy-toe and screamed in horror. (This
reaction is viewed with disdain by real soldiers of Christ who stand calmly,
unmoved and unshaken, secure in the knowledge that in Christ they have the
strength to handle even this crisis. They know the flighty, wimpy, immature
reaction of these shrieking parade-ground soldiers who have never left the
comfort of their padded pews shows they have not only never been in combat,
they don’t even know what this spiritual war is all about.) What did these
tradition-bound translators see in Luther’s writings that not only horrified
them but also made them decide it was better to lie than translate it
correctly? It was just a bunch of shit! You see, it wasn’t “ink” that
Christian translators claim Satan hurled at Luther and Luther threw right back
– it was shit. The great reformer said Satan would pick up some shit (which was
presumably lying around on the floor in Luther’s abode) and throw it at Luther
in an attempt to defeat him. Remaining undaunted though he was now soiled with
shit (“bescheissen”), Luther, in the heat and fury of
this desperate combat with the Devil, scraped the splattered shit off of himself and threw it back. In response Satan mooned Luther
by baring his ass (“steiss”). (This makes Martin
Luther the only known Christian in history who has
seen Satan’s asp hole.) Luther, blood up now, told Satan to “kiss my steiss” and threatened to “throw him into my anus where he
belongs” and “scheiss in his face.” There were multiple
encounters, but one day Luther finally defeated the Devil by threatening to
take Satan’s own pants off of him, shit in them, and hang them around Satan’s
neck. It cannot be determined from Luther’s account if Satan was wearing the
same trousers that he, in the earlier encounter, pulled down in order to moon
Luther, or if it was a different pair. But we do now know that Satan wears
trousers.
Some people have felt that the drama of these
encounters and the fact that there were a number of them not only make Luther a
Christian hero, but also make David’s brief encounter with Goliath, and Michael
the archangel’s encounter with this same Devil (Jude 9), pale in
comparison. Other people think these encounters may indicate the Protestant
reformer was a low-life liar.
Doctrinally, Martin Luther was a product
of Roman Catholicism and pagan philosophy. He never once questioned where
Augustine got the immortality of the soul – in spite of the huge drama
surrounding the issue during the time of Albertus and
Aquinas. Luther did get rid of prayer beads and other trivia, but, by all
accounts, never bothered to examine this major doctrine that had so shaken the
Roman Catholic Church, and never attempted to establish it as Scriptural. He
simply accepted it. He also accepted Reason as a fount of truth, and believed
the three most important areas of Christian life were the church, political
involvement, and the family.
Like other Catholics of his day, Luther
never questioned Augustine’s teaching that sex is evil. Since sex and nudity
were believed – among educated Catholics – to be sinful, anything that would
cause someone to think about sex or nudity was added to the growing list of
Catholic sins. Not only should women cover themselves, but they should do so
with clothes that concealed their shape. Chaucer, for example, in The
Canterbury Tales wrote about “hypocritical” Christian women: “God knows
that the faces of some of them appear properly chaste and debonair” but at the
same time their clothing was an “outrageous array” because of its “horrible disordinate scantiness.” And a man’s reproductive organ
went from being a “penis” to a “member” to a “private member” to a “shameful
private member.”
Harlots were, just as they were in the
Bible, a respectable part of society. These courtesans, or companions, were
popular, wealthy, and often prestigious members of society because they had
contacts in high places. Anal and oral sex were common because there was no
risk of pregnancy. Moves to suppress prostitution were both rare and unpopular
because the unbiblical arguments against it made no sense.
Because they did not understand what the
Bible says about sex, marriage, and divorce, Catholic and Protestant authorities
of the day, such as Erasmus and Luther, taught some
confusing and contradictory things. It was said that in marriages in which the sex was not
satisfying, it was better to obtain sex from someone else rather than commit
the sin of divorce. Luther also taught that anyone who thought her husband to
be impotent or infertile should secretly have sex with other men until she got
pregnant and then say her husband fathered the child. If her husband found out
about her activities and tried to stop her, she could divorce him because he
was preventing her from being fruitful and multiplying (Ge
1:28). Luther lost more of his following when he declared, based on Dt 23:18, sex to be lawful only if you got it
for free – in other words it was a sin to hire
a whore. And, like the Augustine-influenced Chaucer, Luther was indignant
because, in general, European society wasn’t offended by, and therefore
tolerated, public nudity as part of life. He complained that the women of his
day were “immodest, shameless” because at times they’d “go bare before and
behind, and there is no one to punish or correct them.”
As this Augustinian prudishness spread,
Christians ignored their Bibles and decided to make it a sin if a girl married
before her twelfth birthday, and a boy before his
fourteenth birthday. (The Bible neither discourages nor makes it a sin to
become one of Christ’s brides at any age.) When explorers later sailed
around the world they found that other societies in warm climes went naked some
of the time. Teaching these “naked savages” that nudity was sinful became an
immediate and major concern of missionaries. This self-righteousness peaked in
the Victorian era as Christians heaped more tradition on top of what they’d
already gotten from Ambrose, Augustine, and Luther: Hypocritically thinking the
appetite for food was good but the appetite for sex was sinful, Protestants
decided even food could cause their lust to conceive at the dinner table if
they permitted the tasty limb of a chicken to be called a “leg”, so they coined
the term “drumstick.” Then every time they said “drumstick” they congratulated
themselves for not being “carnal.” Once this “doctrine” was accepted,
Christians – who are normally loath to apply the principles behind true
Bible doctrines – demonstrated an inventive zeal for morality by applying it to
other things in life: Christians with money who could afford upholstered
furniture demonstrated their moral superiority over Christians with “bare” or
“naked” furniture by putting a skirt of fabric on their chairs to “decently”
cover the sinfully-seductive curve of the wooden legs. Christians with money
also covered their bodies with layer upon layer of fine fabric and jewelry and
showed it all off by taking Sunday strolls or drives and made condescending
remarks about the naked and grimy poor out toiling in the fields, because the
elite thought God made it easier to avoid sin if you had money. But He made it
just the opposite. Another example of the widespread Christian acceptance of
morality as an authority in all matters of faith and practice can be found in
the Presbyterian minister, Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), who invented the plain
“graham cracker” because he believed spicy and heavily-seasoned foods sinfully
increased sexual desire. And the moral Christian, John Kellogg (1852-1943), one
of the founders of the breakfast cereal company, preached that all sexual
activity was sinful carnality, even between husbands and wives (in over 40
years of marriage he never had sexual intercourse with his wife); and he became
a vegetarian because he believed eating meat heightened the sinful desire to
masturbate, which he called “Onanism” after Ge 38:8-10, which is covered in chapter
D11. The zeal for morality would produce many “Crusaders against Carnality”, such
as Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) who described himself as a “weeder
in God’s garden.” He founded an organization to prevent the public from
transgressing against the rapidly-growing number of “moral sins”, and in 1873
he succeeded in having the U.S. Congress pass a law against the sin of sending
through the mail material that might inflame the prurient passions and
imaginations of people by depicting or describing nudity or sexual acts. Sinful
material that needed to be weeded from God’s garden included marital manuals
and medical textbooks on anatomy, which started the long debate over what is
“pornography”, an argument that was settled by creating a “standard” that was a
blend of ever-changing morality and public opinion: “I’ll know it when I see
it.” In that way “sins” in Martin Luther’s day were different from “sins” in
the Victorian era and were different from “sins” today – because they are based
not on what the Bible says but on the shifting sands of pagan morality and man
becoming the authority in all things by “knowing” good and evil when he sees
it.
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The real historical significance of
Martin Luther wasn’t his doctrine. After all, most Christians don’t care about
doctrine, which is why they prefer morality – you don’t have to study the Bible
to learn the latest morals. Luther was important because he showed society –
indeed, he inspired society – how to act. The Greek philosophers and Augustine
and Aquinas had taught the elite in society how Reason can justify rebellion.
Until now history had seen only a few instances of minor rebellion among the
educated – such as when Emperor Louis IV and William of Ockham used Aquinas to
justify their rebellion. And if commoners rebelled – such as the Peasant’s
Revolt – it was always a relatively small number whose action was disapproved
of by most of the rest of the masses. Martin Luther is the one who took “just
cause rebellion” out of the scholarly realm of philosophic principle and made
it – from that day forward – a part of morality. And that gave it to the masses
who don’t want to have to read, think, and study in obedience to commandments
like 2 Ti 2:15; they just want to know by letting their
“conscience be their guide.” By his very public example Martin Luther did more
to make Reason a part of morality than any other person.
For this reason the intelligentsia who
had the ability to understand principles and concepts – like Erasmus – were
horrified at what Luther had done and broke fellowship with him. Erasmus knew
Catholicism had problems but he thought they could be fixed. The value of
Catholicism, as he saw it, was its ability to unify Christendom the world over
by being a social, governmental, religious, and moral authority that preserved
order by setting and enforcing standards – something Europe lacked when the
Roman Empire collapsed until the rise of the Roman Catholic Church brought it
back. Erasmus didn’t think society would benefit from a bunch of divisive,
independent, Protestant denominations and went to his grave convinced that none
of the Protestant denominations would ever become the authoritative, unifying
standard in Western civilization that Catholicism had been.
Protestants think Erasmus was wrong to
believe his church could be reformed. And if you were to say, “I don’t think
the Catholic Church would ever have reformed, and therefore I think the
Protestants were right to ‘Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers
of her sins’” (Re 18:4), you’d be just as much of a humanist as Erasmus.
God can straighten out any mess if His people would just repent. It is never
right for us to try to straighten out the authorities over us by rebelling. If
you think an organization, church, or nation is ungodly, or you want to escape
unjust persecution Take a hike! When God
saw that Joseph and Mary’s child was in danger from their government, He told
them to Take a hike! and
go live under a different – and pagan – government. That’s right; God told them
to go live under the pagan dictator in Egypt. Another fairly good example of
the way we are to be is the Pilgrims. When they thought the religious climate
in England was getting worse, they decided to Take
a hike! and go to North America. That’s
what “Come out of her, my people” means. It does not mean, “Start a revolution,
my people.” Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft according to God Almighty (1
Sa 15:23), so let’s stop applying moral principles to food and furniture,
and learn to start applying Biblical principles to history so we can then apply
them in our everyday lives: Your homework assignment is to figure out if Martin
Luther and the other ex-Catholic “reformers” were practicing witchcraft
(as in glorifying the Devil) when they started Protestantism. Your
assignment is not to figure out if they had some good ideas or if Catholic
doctrines sucked or if Robert Kennedy was right when he said, “If you’re not a
part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem.” And your assignment is not
to figure out what I think; we all already know I think Luther
should have quietly and respectfully resigned from the priesthood and preached
the truth to those who had ears to hear. Your assignment is to figure out if
what you believe is in accordance with the Book the Lord Jesus Christ is going
to very strictly and literally go by when He has you stand, alone and naked,
before Him at Judgment (Jn 12:48).
Because Martin Luther started the Great Religious
Rebellion, also called the Protestant Reformation, he symbolizes the first
fruits of the Age of Reason in the religious arena. It can be argued that this
was Western society’s first practical philosophy-based step towards
independence and egalitarianism. This also marked the Protestant doctrinal
acceptance of rebellion against authority – a doctrine that exalted pagan
philosophy and ignored the word of God, such as Ge 2:17 and Ro 13:1-5. It
was a major and radical turning point in history. King Henry VIII would soon
start the Great Political Rebellion by hypocritically following Luther’s
example – just like another Englishman, Ockham, hypocritically adopted the
teachings of Aquinas. But before we move on to the British Enlightenment, let’s
briefly look at some of the practical changes in society that would happen as a
result of Reason.
Explorers like Magellan circled the globe
and proved Christians were wrong about basic things like the flat earth, and
therefore might be wrong about religious doctrine, too. The explorers gave
credibility to the wise old Greek philosophers who had, a thousand years before
Magellan was born, decided the earth was spherical. They also found that God
seemed to be blessing non-Christians, because pagan societies were flourishing
all over the round world in spite of Christianity’s teaching that God was
greatly upset that pagans weren’t following Him. And Christianity, which had
been called into question by philosophy, lost more credibility as God’s one
true religion when explorers reported how many pagan doctrines and practices
closely resembled those in the Bible, which seemed to suggest all religions
were acceptable to God because they all seemed to have a number of shared
beliefs. People didn’t know the doctrinal similarities were a result of the
division of the human race in Abraham’s day, so the similarities convinced them
to accept the Greek teaching that all men really do have souls with eternal
life and that all men really are connected via Reason and Natural Law to The
Truth.
Ways to measure time were invented –
clocks – and Time became a new influence on society. The old wisdom of “antique
civilizations”, which science was now “proving” to be more reliable than the
Bible and Christianity, had always been theorized (based on Reason) to be “more
reliable” because the corrupting ravages of Time had had a shorter span in
which to influence the Ancient Ones. Even the Bible, which Christians had
always considered to be the incorruptible and eternal word of God, was now
deemed to be just as susceptible to the corruptions of Time as it would be if
man had written it. For that Reason old Bible manuscripts, no matter how
corrupt, would be used in the making of “modern” Bible versions and would be
called “older” and “better” and “more reliable” because older and better
were now believed to be synonyms.
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Because older was better, certain scholars,
called antiquarians, devoted themselves to the task of finding the Truth
of Natural Law by researching old customs and laws in the belief that older
societies had been less influenced by Time and were therefore more prone to be
in touch with Nature’s Laws. And because Christians now accepted Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas as legitimate “precedents” upon which to
build doctrines (now that we knew pagan philosophers were at least as likely to
be in touch with God’s Natural Laws as Christians), it must therefore be
appropriate to research old pagan Roman laws and codes, old documents like the
Magna Carta, old pagan tribal council rulings, old
court cases, etc., in order to find “legal precedents” upon which to build
Western civilization. These antiquarian methods were increasingly needed
because the more Christians learned the more they realized philosophy – secular
Reason divorced from the Bible – was the only way to avoid repeating the
embarrassing mistakes of the past, which Christian societies only made because
they narrow-mindedly relied on the Scriptures as not only the sole authority in
all matters of faith, but as the sole authority in all matters of practical
life as well.
Science, which by definition is knowledge
derived from the secular/philosophical method, became a superstar.
Superstitious Christians had previously speculated that God ran the universe,
that He was the active “Prime Mover” of the Greek philosophers. But Isaac
Newton observed the heavens through Galileo’s telescope, put together some of
Pythagoras’ mathematical equations, and “proved” the Greeks were right about
the universe being run by Nature’s Laws – in this case by the law of gravity
(which is still not understood). But even though Newton was so much of an
Enlightened Christian that he rejected the deity of Christ and thought science
should be part of theology so science could “correct” religion, he didn’t want
to leave “God” out entirely, so he declared that God was indeed Aristotle’s
Prime Mover who started the ball rolling way back then but who leaves
everything up to gravity now. Newton was widely acclaimed as “The Greatest Man
Who Ever Lived.” Buddha, Alexander, Christ, Zoroaster, Little Bo Peep,
Aristotle, and Mohammed all contributed in their way, but Newton finally proved
to all men of Reason that the Way of Truth was the philosophical way of
humanistic Reason. He was called the “Prophet of Enlightenment.” Mathematics
was validated as a great revealer of truth – just like the Greeks said. And as
the years and centuries passed, science would never fail mankind. It would
rapidly replace religion as the dominant influence on both government and
society. Kings used to rely on religion to win their wars; now they would rely
on science. Religion in general and Christianity in particular became and
remain second-rate forces in and on society in the Western world.
It must be understood that science
is not different from or separate from philosophy. Philosophy is merely
using the carnal/secular mind in the pursuit of truth. Science is what you
learn during that secular pursuit. By definition, religion cannot be involved
with either philosophy or science. Since about 1900 the two words have
polarized in usage so that many people think one has to do with vague mental
concepts while the other concerns hard facts of life. In other words, today the
specialized applications of the same philosophy have caused some people to
incorrectly think science and philosophy are fundamentally different.
Until recently the courses in our educational
institutions that we’d consider “science” or “mathematics” courses were called
“natural philosophy” courses (look it up in the dictionary) because they are
offspring of the philosophic method – which today is called the scientific
method – of finding truths via the Natural mind as taught by the Greek
philosophers. For example, in the 1850s T.J. “Stonewall” Jackson taught courses
in Physics and Optics at the Virginia Military Institute. Those were called
Natural Philosophy courses and he was a Natural Philosophy professor – titles
that were relics from only a generation before when educated men still thought
there was some validity to the Natural Law upon which the United States was
founded.