McAtee Contra DeYoung on the Enlightenment

While I often disagree with the conclusions reached by Enlightenment theologians and philosophers, we should not misread the Enlightenment as everywhere anti-clerical and anti-Christian. The leading lights in the Scottish Enlightenment, for example, were middle-class and upper-middle-class professional men. They were not bohemians, pantheists, free thinkers, revolutionaries, or otherwise alienated intellectuals. The Moderate literati were elite members of society, serving key roles in law, education, and the church. And whether we label them Enlightenment thinkers or not, there is no doubt stalwart evangelicals like John Witherspoon, John Erskine, and Jonathan Edwards were not afraid to enter the most contested philosophical controversies of the 18th century and employ Enlightenment categories when necessary.
 
Kevin DeYoung
Malefactor of the Church
TGC Article (2018)
 
Understand the whole idea of the Enlightenment was premised upon right reason (autonomously considered) and Natural law (also autonomously considered). The Enlightenment even gathers it title from the fact that it reason for existence was that it was pushing away the darkness of the historically prior 1st and 2nd Reformation in favor of a pagan brining of light. The Enlightenment was a return to the Renaissance era type thinking where man was the measure of all things. The Enlightenment was the Enlightenment precisely because man had collectively determined, as led by mankind’s leading lights, that God would not rule over them.
 
Keep in mind also that the maxim of the Enlightenment was not only the usage of autonomous right reason (humanism) and autonomously read Natural Law (more Humanism) but it also championed the idea that man is basically good and held in the inevitability of (humanist) progress, not to mention the perfectibility of man. The old Christian idea that man is basically sinful and fallen and that progress while possible was completely dependent on God’s providence as man walked in terms of God’s revealed word was cast into the wind. The Enlightenment taught the man would be his own God. Remember the maxims of the French Revolution which ushered in the Enlightenment;
 
No, God… No King.
 
Remember the motto of the French Philosophes;
 
“We will not be satisfied until the last priest is strangled by the entrails of the last King.”

This Enlightenment is the Enlightenment that DeYoung is swooning over? Keep in mind what has been mentioned were foundational building blocks of the Enlightenment project. From those foundational building blocks of the goodness of man, the inevitability of progress, and the perfectibility of man came four consequences that typified and typifies that period.

1.) The first was a shift in the intellectual community from a firm and highly rational epistemology to a rational but dualistic epistemology with a gradual shift in focus from the Bible the human intellect as authoritative.

2.) The State came to be looked upon as secular and profane, and it was argued that the church should have nothing to do with the state. The creeping influence of this Enlightenment mindset eventually hollowed out the previous Christianity that had existed prior to the Enlightenment project by applying the same principle to not only Christianity and state relations but also to Christianity and arts, to Christianity and family life, to Christianity and the Academy, to Christianity and Law, etc. etc. etc.

3.) The third consequence was the Reactionary counter-revolution that was incipient in the American War for Independence. The “American counter-Revolution” was an attempt to stem the far reaching impact of the Enlightenment in Europe. Unfortunately, the American counter-Revolution, such as it was, was still infected by Enlightenment thinking as the founding documents reveal a push me – pull you between forces Christian vs. forces Enlightenment. However, the moderate success of the American counter-Revolution prolonged until 1861 the old consensus of a Christian social-order.

4.) The fourth consequence of the Enlightenment was the reactionary  establishment of The American Constitutional order and system. Again, the Enlightenment seeds of destruction were contained in the American Constitutional order and system, however those seeds took time to germinate in a full blown Enlightenment direction choked off as they were by the roundup of Biblical Christianity that was also fused in that American Constitutional order and system. In the time between the founding of America and its own French Revolution in 1861 the American Constitutional order and system provided a bulwark against the full tide of the Christian eating Enlightenment order.

 
DeYoung’s idea that the Enlightenment was, from a macro consideration, a mixed bag of good and bad for the Christian faith is just hooey. DeYoung is reading these Enlightenment authors who are lovers of this period and are themselves Enlightenment men. They are informing Kevin — the wonder kid — how grand the Enlightenment was and Kevin in turn is spilling that bilge on the young skulls full of mush that traipse through his classrooms. Those men will in short order eventually be standing in front of congregations telling their congregants that “the Enlightenment wasn’t all bad you know.” I suppose even Herpes isn’t all bad.
 
It’s enough to drive the epistemologically self-conscious nuts.
 
DeYoung saying that the Enlightenment was good for the Church in certain ways is just ministerial malpractice of the worst sort. Now to be sure there were godly men who lived (and are living currently) in the “age of Reason” (Enlightenment) but that doesn’t mean that they were at home in their times. That doesn’t mean that if they could have changed the tenor and macro movement of the Enlightenment project that they would not have. So, DeYoung citing men who lived in the age of Enlightenment does not prove the wholesomeness of the Enlightenment any more than children conceived in whorehouses proves the wholesomeness of whorehouses.
 
Those names that DeYoung drops were at war with their age. Men like Edwards, Witherspoon, and Erskine, or he could have added, men like Dabney, Thornwell, and Girardeau were each and all at war with key components of the epoch labeled “The Enlightenment.” Certainly not every child born starting roughly in 1789 and continuing to today are going to be children who have imbibed and digested the tenets and goals of the Enlightenment. God always has 7000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal. But to suggest that the macro movement of the Enlightenment hasn’t been a God-hating project from its inception is worst than incompetence. It is dereliction of duty.

If one desire to understand the Enlightenment in categories different than offered by DeYoung I strongly recommend securing and reading Dr. Glenn E. Martin’s “Prevailing Worldviews of Western Society Since 1500.”

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

2 thoughts on “McAtee Contra DeYoung on the Enlightenment”

  1. The way he is steering them, the young pastors may even be saying “The Great Reset wasn’t all that bad” in their later years.

    Reply

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