14 September 2025

Christ in Every Age: The Age of Reason

Isaiah 44:6-11

Last week I talked about the prevailing worldview of Europe before about 1500, what I called “The Enchanted World,” and specifically about how Christians incorporated that worldview into the practice of their faith. In that worldview, the world was seen as a battleground between various magical and spiritual forces, and so God came to be thought of as the strongest of all the spirits, and the source of the supreme magic. Christian symbols and holy water and saints’ relics and Communion were thought to have magical powers and were used accordingly. Now, this is emphatically not biblical. Both Old and New Testaments warn against magic, but a worldview is a stubborn thing to dislodge. Worldviews are not discarded; they are replaced.

And eventually that happened. Let me introduce you to another historical Christian that I just invented. This one is a young 18th century French nobleman named Bertrand LeClerc. Bertrand is a brilliant young man who has studied philosophy and science at the University of Paris, but even more importantly, has been exposed to the wit and wisdom of the greatest minds in Europe: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller. He has read Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica from cover to cover. Now, as I said, Bertrand is a devout Christian, but he is inexpressibly grateful that he was born in a time past the superstitious savagery of medieval Christianity. How anyone could believe such obvious nonsense as miraculous healings by saints’ bones – or indeed any miraculous healings at all – is incomprehensible to Bertrand. God is not a genie to be summoned to do wonders at people’s convenience! Why do people not understand that God is greater than that? God didn’t just create the world; God imbued it with all the principles that would enable it to maintain itself according to the divine pattern! God is the divine architect, the heavenly clockmaker, the one who established the plan for the universe and set it in motion. And as for morality, God is not a lawgiver, exactly – certainly not like that primitive story in Exodus, where God carved laws in stone for Moses! – but God is the one who gave his greatest creation, humanity, the divine Reason to understand all principles of rational morality. 

And having done all that, having set the heavens and the earth in motion, and having given humanity that spark of divine Reason that will enable us to discern all truth, all ethical questions, and all wisdom, God no longer has to be personally involved in the world. If God were still busy on earth, fixing things for people, answering prayers, that would imply that God’s creation was inadequate. But it is not. God has already given humanity all the tools necessary to create a perfect world – an Enlightened world, free at last from the ignorance and darkness of past ages. 

My imaginary Bertrand’s worldview is the one that would eventually replace that of the Enchanted World in Western Civilization. Not all at once, of course. In the 18th century, where I set Bertrand, it was only held by an educated elite. It would take centuries for it to take root in the popular mind. But it has, hasn’t it? We no longer think in terms of spirits, magic, and miracles, do we? Our default assumption when anything happens is that it has some logical, natural, rational explanation. Even we who believe in God and miracles start out with that assumption. Like Bertrand, we are all trying to fit our belief into a rational worldview. And we  have support in scripture. 

We read from Isaiah chapter 44, verses 6-11:

6 Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel
   and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts:
I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.
7 Who is like me? Let them proclaim it,
   let them declare and set it forth before me.
Who has announced from of old the things to come?
   Let them tell us what is yet to be.
8 Do not fear, or be afraid;
   have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses!
Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.

9 All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. 10Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? 11Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.

The prophet whose words are recorded in the second half of the Book of Isaiah is a remarkable writer and revolutionary thinker. All the Hebrew Bible tells people to worship only one God, but most of the early passages seem to imply that other gods exist – we just aren’t supposed to worship them. But this prophet makes it clear that there is no other god. Everything else that is worshiped as a god is just something that God made. People who bow down to idols are almost as brainless as the blocks of wood and stone that they worship. This prophet, writing toward the end of Israel’s exile in Babylon, not only says that Israel’s God is the only God, but he goes the next step and declares that Israel’s God is therefore everyone’s God. God cares about all nations, because God made all nations. Furthermore – and this sounds a lot like our Enlightenment Christian Bertrand – this God has a plan and is carrying it out. God doesn’t just send thunderbolts in response to events on earth; God is behind those events, working through them. God is behind everything and beyond everything.

Now, because we live in the post-enlightenment West and have inherited much of that era’s worldview, you’re probably more comfortable with Bertrand’s version of Christian faith than you were with that of last week’s heroine, Maud, the 15th century farmwife who believed that snitched Communion wafers could foil witch’s spells. Me, too. But as I said last week, while Maud’s Christianity was problematic in many ways, there were also some things to admire in it. Let’s try to be just as evenhanded with Bertrand’s Enlightenment faith.

First, let’s talk about what’s good, and there are so many ways that Bertrand’s faith is an improvement on Maud’s. Maud’s was a faith based on fear. She saw the world as a scary place, and she saw God as a protection. Was God good? Was God just? Those questions were less important than whether God was strong enough to protect her from the power of Satan. But to Bertrand, God is good and just and moral. In one sense, Bertrand’s God is bigger than Maud’s God. In an Enlightenment faith, God is of cosmic dimensions – not only the creator of every distant star, but the deviser of all the laws of physics that set that star in motion. As Psalm 8 reminds us, God’s majesty is evident in all earth and heaven. Moreover, in Bertrand’s faith, humanity also has dignity. In Maud’s world, people saw themselves as subject to the whims of the spirits that surrounded them, but the Enlightenment and modern science rejected superstition. As sociologist Max Weber put it, modern science has disenchanted the world. We humans are not controlled by random sorceries; we are rational creatures and control our own destinies. 

Yes, it’s good that the Enlightenment helped us to put away the religion of fear. But we also need to acknowledge that Bertrand’s faith is, in its own ways, just as un-biblical and inadequate as Maud’s. I said, for instance, that the Enlightenment faith restored human dignity. And that’s good, up to a point. Scripture does say that we bear God’s image. But it also says that we’ve screwed that image up pretty royally. The faith of the Enlightenment, like most progressive movements, has a touchingly idiotic belief that we humans can make the world right by our own rational efforts. The Enlightenment leaders of the French Revolution believed that they could construct a perfect, just, and moral society through Reason alone. How’d that work out, anyway? The enlightened church of the late 19th century – applying an imperfect understanding of Darwin – believed that we modern Christians were on an inevitable evolutionary trajectory to end war and poverty and create heaven on earth through science – only to find out in 1918 that our science had also created mustard gas, tanks, and machine guns. A biblical faith acknowledges human dignity and human depravity.

And if humans are sometimes glorified beyond what they deserve in the faith of the Enlightenment, God is sometimes sidelined. I said earlier that the Enlightenment God is larger than the God of the Enchanted World, in the sense of being conceived of as more than a magical helper. But in another sense, the Enlightenment God is smaller – in that God is assigned a smaller place in people’s lives. If God’s sole purpose was to create everything and set it in motion, then God has no particular role today. Isaac Newton famously said that we still needed God, because science hadn’t explained everything yet, but all that has meant is that as we have explained more and more, Newton’s God has become smaller and smaller. Indeed, the whole notion that God’s purpose is to explain stuff has already diminished God. God is more than a hypothesis. In the Enlightenment faith, God is often distant, irrelevant, purely decorative. The American pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick (who wrote the hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory”) lived during that time of optimistic scientific faith before the First World War, and his comment on that faith was, “We have somehow reached the point where we believe that it is the highest compliment that can be paid to Almighty God that some scientists still believe in him.” 

Here is scripture’s response. God is the creator of all. And God is the one who knows and loves each person intimately. God is the one who started creation. And God is the one who has never ceased creating. God is awesomely beyond our imagination. And God is the one who loved us so desperately that he joined us on earth in flesh as a human. God is more than either of the two worldviews we have looked at. God not just a useful magical assistant, nor is God an absentee landlord. God is bigger than both.