Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Chur ch Mat ter s : Ret r i ev i ng the Great Trad i t i on

4. Exiting contested lands for the new Promised Land of religious freedom: Puritans (“manifest destiny”)

II. Movements of the Church in the 19th Century

This was the great century of modernity. It began with a series of political upheavals which opened the way for the ideals of democracy and free enterprise – North American independence, the French Revolution, and then the independence of the Latin American nations. Part of the ideal of these new nations was freedom of conscience, so that no one would be forced to affirm anything of which they were not convinced.

~ Justo L. Gonzalez. Church History: An Essential Guide . Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996, p. 83.

A. Modernity: political upheaval, emerging democracies, and free enterprise

1. Political upheaval: the rise of the nation state: shift from hegemonic control over nations

2. The Enlightenment:

The deepest roots of much of nineteenth-century criticism lie in the l7th-l8th centuries, when the “sciences of man” were beginning to be developed. Modern philosophy began with Descartes in France and the rise of Empiricism in Britain (Hobbes, Locke, et al). The Enlightenment was the human attempt to understand this world from several nontheistic points of view. This aspect of the Enlightenment placed the human being at the center of all things and tried to under stand him from a humanistic point of view; but a parallel attempt to understand the world, indeed the cosmos, also developed and was a precursor to nineteenth-century positiv ism. The supernatural and revealed religion were challenged, while a religion of reason was supported (cf. Deism), textual criticism had its beginnings, a concern for history and history writing was engendered, and a general feeling of the gradual growth, development, and progress of mankind was held by many. The people of the Enlightenment tended to see the past barbarous eras of mankind superseded by the present