Lecture 29: Deism and Liberal Protestantism
God, such as Judaism based on the Torah and Talmud, Christianity based on
the Bible, and Islam based on the Koran. “Natural religion” meant religious
beliefs that were based on reason, which is universal and common to
all humanity.The Deists regarded reason, and therefore natural religion, as the norm by
which to judge revealed religions, including Christianity. Natural religion
included belief in God, morality, and reward or punishment in an afterlife.
Natural religion has no place for the supernatural, miracles or divine
intervention in nature. Natural religion had
no place for mystery, incomprehensible
dogma that goes beyond natural reason (the
kind of reason one ¿ nds in natural science).
Natural religion has no need of priests and
their dogmatic authority. Natural religion
has no need for rituals and sacraments
which are the object of superstitious awe
and worship.Early Deists regarded Christianity as a
republication of the universal truths of
natural religion, with a few inessential historical additions which could be
discarded. Later Deists often regarded revealed religion, and Christianity
in particular, as a corruption of natural religion. Typically, however, even
the later Deists admire Jesus, presenting him as a teacher of natural religion
whose message was distorted by the apostles.Liberal Protestantism, in its classic 19th-century German form, proposed to
save Christian faith by ¿ nding its basis in Christian experience rather than
dogma. The Liberal turn to experience begins with the Romantic movement
in Germany. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the founder of Liberal theology
was, in his youth a friend of founders of German Romanticism, whom he
addresses in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. His key
appeal to them is that piety is a feeling that comes before dogma, ritual, and
morality. It is a preconceptual or immediate sense of the in¿ nite behind the
¿ nite. Words, doctrines, rituals, morality, and other external manifestations
of religion are outward expressions of this prior, inner experience.Enlightenment thinkers
used the distinction
between natural and
revealed religion
to understand the
diversity of religions,
especially Christianity.