Enlightenment Thinking QA
The old questions of the Enlightenment against Christ and their answers.
Q: If nature operates by immutable laws, how can divine intervention fit?
A: Immutable natural law is an expression of God's attribute - He doesn't change. Yet, we see Him working in the Bible episodically in many different ways which, on the surface, seem different from each other - even opposite, sometimes!
This is the same thing we find in nature, but the Enlightenment binds its adherents to a more rigid interpretation, so they sometimes miss the greatest varieties when they seem to be contradictory. Their fear of losing the advantage over God (though it isn't one, really) is strong enough to keep them from fully embracing their senses in accordance with their philosophies; if they did, they might accept their surprising observations more readily and not immediately throw them out as tainted data.
God is immutable from the single point of view of the entire varied Universe.
Q: If knowledge must be grounded in evidence, what happens to faith?
A: It's a mere assertion of the Enlightenment thinkers that all knowledge must be grounded in eyesight, which is the apriori denial of faith by definition. Thus, this question arose, but not with any basis of its own.
~~~ ChatGPT
Rational Christianity (Deism): Some thinkers retained belief in God but redefined Him as a rational architect who set the universe in motion and did not intervene. Miracles, revelation, and specific doctrines were viewed skeptically. This was religion reduced to ethics and natural theology—belief in a Creator discerned through reason and the order of nature. Thomas Jefferson’s cut-down “Bible” of moral teachings fits this pattern.
Orthodox defense: Others doubled down on revelation and miracle, seeing reason’s limits as proof that divine mystery lay beyond it. This produced a renewed emphasis on biblical authority and later fueled revival movements (like Methodism and the Great Awakenings).
Liberal theology: A third group sought reconciliation. They argued that faith and reason are complementary: revelation tells us of God’s moral nature, while science reveals His creation’s mechanisms. By the 19th century, this approach evolved into “liberal Christianity,” which treated the Bible as a record of humanity’s moral and spiritual progress rather than an infallible code.
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Deism is the foothold of secularism into Christianity - a mere spy network, but nothing to do with Christ.
The real tension lies between the other two groups.
On the one hand, Orthodoxy is correct about the existence of miracles, dubious about using the reason of reason's lack to confirm divine mystery (because, since it's lacking, using our reason to validate God subverts God's autonomy over His own greater mindset), and the outcome is highly useful.
On the other hand, Liberalism is correct to see that God and His Universe must mesh. It's correct that reason is useful, because God created reason and because Paul the Apostle speaks of the God-serving mind as distinct from the sin-serving body. But they are incorrect to put reason on the same level as faith, because only those who believe and confess Master Jesus in accordance with the necessary biblical doctrine of justification by faith and confession have the capacity of serving Christ with the mind; everyone else still has a subverted mind and cannot use theirs against true faith in the actual God! Their failure to realize the limits of the mind caused an arrogance that meshed well with the arrogance of the Enlightenment, and so their well-intentioned compromise was overtaken by one side - the wrong and satanic side - especially as it transformed into its harder codification by its very low view of the Bible.
Today, Liberalism has even given up its conception of the Bible as authoritative in morality in order to further compromise itself with the World's conception of every wind of doctrine through the ever-evolving ethics of Satan's community. Orthodoxy has fought to prove God by mental structures, which is helpful to bolster those who have faith but powerless as it always has been to convince the unbelieving Worldlings, because faith comes by hearing God's call and not by perceiving God's Universe.
Overall, the World thinks Christ and the concept of His Spirit's call is too foolish to consider, and reason is left bankrupt by all the wrong pressures it's been forced to undergird in our foundational use. Our daily use of reason forces realignment to reality by the nature of reality's daily needs, and God can use our mundane experiences to overcome these falsehoods of ritualistic rationalisms, where we think we are thinkers, but God has given over Satan's communities to fill up their worldwide cup of evil until the end. Then Jesus will come back and explain it to everyone more carefully, when He will do the enlightening of all of us in a single moment!
And His mercy endures forever as He reigns a thousand years. Do you understand? Then He will defeat His final two enemies - death and Hell - those who were in Hell will bow and call Him Master, their names won't be found in the Book of Life and so they will suffer the second death, and He will cede authority back to the One who gave it to Him in the first place. And then...? And then! ...God knows, and we know to trust Him in full reality.