Church History, Volume Two: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day

They sometimes linked moral decline to the nefarious influence of Arianism, atheism, and deism within English society. They believed that the real goal of atheistic and deistic authors was to justify licentious lifestyles.

They were especially hostile toward the followers of George Fox (1624–91), who after a mystical conversion (1647) indicated that Christ, the “Inner Light,” through “immediate revelations” directly leads believers. Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), was arrested eight times. In 1681 William Penn, who had also spent time in prison, was allowed to emigrate to America and there established a refuge for Quakers in what got called “Penn’s Woods” — that is, Pennsylvania.

On January 22, 1689, Parliament approved the Declaration of Rights, or the English Bill of Rights, which redefined the authority of monarchs and also barred any Catholic from becoming a monarch in the future. The Anglican clergy rejoiced that their church could enjoy a renewed privileged status. On January 31 they praised God’s providence in delivering England. A much relieved Bishop John Tillotson declared that the English were “next to the Jewish nation … a people highly favored by God above all the nations of the earth.”

On February 13 “William and Mary” —as they are commonly referred to—were proclaimed king and queen of England.

Baxter, who was also author of The Reformed Pastor (1656), believed that godly pastors were needed to catechize families in their homes, to fend off antinomianism, to calm political chaos, to bring an end to an era of religious divisions, and to foster a “mere [meaning ‘nothing less than’] Christianity” among the English people. He asked, “Do not your hearts bleed to look upon the state of England?” He observed that “few towns or cities there be (where is any forwardness in religion) that are not cut into shreds and crumbled as to dust by separations and divisions.” He also provided wise counsel regarding how unity among Christians might be achieved: “In things necessary, there must be unity; in things less than necessary, there must be liberty; and in all things, there must be charity.”

he challenge to and competition between “authorities” could take different forms. The “shock of discovery” — regarding what voyagers to the New World and elsewhere reported they actually encountered versus what writers from antiquity had indicated they should experience or witness—led to questioning of the ancient authorities.

Petrarch called Avignon “the sewer of the world.” In Montaillou (in very southern France), inquisitors harvested this contemporary complaint from locals about the wealth of the popes and other members of the clergy: “The Pope devours the blood and sweat of the poor. And the bishops and the priests, who are rich and honored and self-indulgent, behave in the same manner, whereas St. Peter abandoned his wife, his children, his fields, his vineyards and his possessions to follow Christ.”

The period 1300–1500 began ominously for the Western church with the so-called “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (1309–77) that directly challenged its long-standing traditions and institutional identity because the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon (at the time on the French border).

“Reason is to the philosophe what grace is to the Christian. Grace determines the Christian to act; reason determines the philosophe” (Diderot’s Encyclopédie).

In this particular context la philosophie was not defined as a technical discipline or field of study in philosophy but rather as an attitude or a habit of critical thinking. Humankind would benefit enormously from this new era of “reason,” no longer encumbered by the doctrines of sin and redemption through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Religious wars would cease; toleration and respect for the rights of others would grace personal relations; and civility, reasonableness, and urbanity would characterize polite society at large. Happiness and material well-being would also increase due to advances in science, medicine, and technology.

These historians contend that Christianity by no means withered away during the Siècle des lumières. Jeremy Black observes, “The concept of a de-christianized and enlightened Europe is increasingly questioned. It is not simply that the Enlightenment can be seen to have had a dark side, such as the preoccupation with the occult, but rather that the culture of the elite was still generally Christian.” Yvon Belaval and Dominique Bourel add that the eighteenth century was in fact an “Age of the Bible”: “Whereas the production of religious books crumbled during the eighteenth century, never were more Bibles printed; it was the most read, the most edited, the most sought after [book]. Never since Luther were there so many translations and commentaries.”

Eventually Louis XVI approved the Edict of Toleration (1787), thereby granting the Huguenots of France at least a number of civil rights.