course material

1. Overview Enlightenment Rationalism
HTH-511 Topic 5 Overview Enlightenment Rationalism (1700-1800) The Reformation
changed Europe and ushered in the modern era. However, it also left Europe in a state of
crisis. Out of this crisis emerged the Enlightenment. The crisis of the Enlightenment was the
crisis of authority. The Reformation called into question the authority of the church by
pointing to the authority of the Bible. However, as Protestant scholasticism showed, there
were a number of ways to interpret the Bible. At the same time, the reformers invested the
princes with authority. As Martin Luther argued in his “Appeal to the Nobility of the German
Nation,” princes had the duty by God to protect the religion of their citizens. Because of the
diversity of religion after the Reformation, the basic solution was to say that the official
religion of the region was the religion of the individual who was in charge. Princes had a
newfound power and they often appealed to their duty to ensure the integrity of their
religion in order to justify the expansion of their domain. The modern nation state emerged
as these rulers went to war to expand and define their jurisdiction. The numerous conflicts
that arose as a result of the ambition of these princes were once called the European “Wars
of Religion.” The notion that they were religiously motivated wars has now been debunked,
but the reason why they were originally pitched as religious wars is important.
Enlightenment philosophers attributed the bloody conflicts to religion and further argued
that religion is inherently an unstable source for authority since so few of its claims can be
agreed upon. This led to a cry for a new source of authority for modern society. If religion
caused controversy and violence, they needed something other than religion as the source
for societal organization and public policy. Here entered the rise of natural reason. For the
new thinkers, “reason” was thought to be in innate to every human being. While religion
needed to be cultivated through a culture and a church, every human was given reason at
his or her birth. Hence the famous exhortation of Immanuel Kant to “think for yourself” in
his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The hope was that since all humans were endowed with
reason, all humans could agree on universal truth. Reason would be a more stable basis for
society than religion. This put religion on its heels. From here forward, if religion were to
have a role in society, it would have to prove its rationality. That is, it would have to prove
itself a universal truth that every human could innately recognize. This led to the rise of
Deism, which dramatically stripped religion of most of its specificity and claims to divine
intervention. Later it led to two different forms of apologetics, empirical apologetics that
sought to give historical or scientific proof of religious claims, and idealist apologetics that
sought to argue from reason itself (e.g., presuppositional apologetics). © 2019. Grand

2. Canyon University. All Rights Reserved For this assignment you will select three of the six
questions below. This assignment will be visible from the beginning of this topic and will be
due to the instructor at the end of Topic 5. Each selected question must be answered with
700-800 words. Make sure to write as clearly and specifically as possible. Review and utilize
any material and references from previous assignments in order to focus and maximize
your answer. 1. Explain Martin Luther’s understanding of justification by faith against its
late medieval context. 2. How did the Renaissance influence scriptural interpretation in
such a way that it set up the Reformation? 3. Explain the Catholic Counter-Reformation and
its agents. 4. Explain the theological shifts related to God’s will in late medieval nominalism
and assess whether Luther and Calvin’s understanding of predestination was an outworking
of those shifts. 5. Explain the differences among the four main branches of the Reformation:
Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed, and Anglican. 6. Explain the Enlightenment understanding
of reason and how reason becomes the basis for secular society. Prepare this assignment
according to the guidelines found in the Turabian Style Guide, located in the Student Success
Center.#Overview #Enlightenment #Rationalism