Natural Religion

“In the eighteenth century a new movement arose among intellectual Christians that came to be known as Deism or natural religion. These “enlightened” Christians insisted that all divine revelation—including Scripture—and especially the Great Tradition of Christian teaching and belief had to be judged by the canons of modern philosophical and scientific knowledge.

The British philosopher John Locke was a precursor of natural religion insofar as his book The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) judged divine revelation itself by modern, secular standards of inquiry and knowledge. Locke’s Jesus was reduced to “The Messiah”—a kind of ethical prophet and spiritual leader who helped humanity rise to a newer and higher level. (Locke did not, however, deny any of the dogmas of Christianity. He simply neglected them.)

Deism and natural religion proper actually began with Locke’s disciple John Toland and then came to its purest form in Matthew Tyndal, both of whom argued that enlightenment reason must be the ultimate source and norm even for Christian belief. Other Deists and natural religionists who considered themselves Christians in some sense of the word included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

In Europe a form of Deism and natural religion flourished among the intellectual elite and found organizational form in the Unitarian movement that began in London and spread to the United States in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), which represents a deistic and natural religion approach to Christianity”

“The Mosaic of Christian Belief” by Roger Olson

 

Threeness

“(Theologian A.H. ) Strong is correct that since the earliest days of postapostolic Christianity Christians have recognized a threeness in God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19 contains the triune formula for Christian baptism and this is quoted by the writer of the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles—perhaps the earliest extant Christian writing after the New Testament itself. The apostle Paul used the triune formula in benedictions toward the ends of some of his epistles; the second-century bishop and church father Ignatius of Antioch (d. 112) used colorful triune language in his letter to the Ephesians: “you are stones of a temple, prepared beforehand for the building of God the Father, hoisted up to the heights by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using as a rope the Holy Spirit; your faith is what lifts you up, and love is the way that leads up to God.”

“The Mosaic of Christian belief” by Roger Olson

Arianism

“The third major heretical Christology is Arianism. Because this was already discussed in the earlier chapter on the Trinity, I will not describe it at length here. Suffice it to say that Arianism is little or nothing more than a sophisticated form of adoptionism that pushes the origin of Christ back before his birth as a baby in Bethlehem and claims that he was God’s first and greatest creature but not God or equal with God.

Modern Jehovah’s Witnesses (The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) confess this Christology without calling it Arianism. They believe that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the archangel Michael. This Christology suffers all the same defects as adoptionism; it reduces Jesus Christ to a creature and robs him of his exalted status as worship-worthy deity. How a mere creature—whether human or angelic—can redeem lost and sinful humanity is an unanswerable question. Redemption has to be redefined as pulling oneself up by one’s moral and spiritual bootstraps following the good example set by Jesus Christ. That is not the gospel of the New Testament or of the Christian church over two millennia.”

from “The Mosaic of Christian Belief” by Roger Olson