When the “apostle Paul” converted to the new “Christian” movement, his role of being the “apostle to the Gentiles” probably indicates a struggle he had endured for years, growing up a Jew, even a Pharisee, within a Hellenistic, Roman culture. His idea was eventually articulated that God had planned from the beginning to eradicate the division of humanity into Jew vs. Gentile, to create a new world of united humanity, and he was chosen by God as the man for the job. Interestingly, his attempts to solve the problem between the content of one religion with its particular, contingent historical presuppositions and requirements—and the inclusiveness spoken of as a universal salvation—defied logic as well as human nature and later history. Instead, Christianity for the most part perpetuated the exclusiveness of the tradition, the very specific new symbols, rituals, ideas, and requirements, and very few leaders or later theologians reduced those particulars by the universal claim and significance the church had used as its identification. The bifurcation gained more and more strength to the point of finally being available to be used for attempting to “convert” the “pagan” by force via tactics such as the Crusades or Columbus’ sword-wielding crew of sailors or others.
But what kind of justification can one find for dividing humanity, and utilizing ancient divisions with a mythology and Absolute metaphysics throughout millennia, to coerce people of the religion to continue the divisiveness? Are there any pockets on our dear earth where religious exclusiveness has not led to a sinister segregation? If genetics can help us understand why we find people caring more strenuously for their own children than for “foster” or “adopted” children, that alone is insufficient justification for an unequal approach to the children. Humans are rational creatures; they can do better. Sooner or later, the disparity of treatment, even if it is confined to one’s attitude, must give way a greater humanitarian sensitivity or humanity is lost.
“Natural” Religion: Could It Justify the Bifurcation of Humanity?
Perhaps the line drawn by religion, making it exclusive, would make sense if one could articulate reasonably that religion is universal, inherent, or “natural” to humans, and it was what carried the idea of such a division of humanity? So everyone knows the same thing: that there is a God and He expects us to live morally, and He will finally separate those who do so from those who do not for rewards and punishment. Thus, everybody is assumed to know the rules as well as goal of the game. Then those within the religious group could say that the division also came naturally since they accepted that which was natural or common to all humans, but the others evidently rejected it. But if it was so natural, how could anyone have rejected it? Why would not all humans have accepted it and acted accordingly?
This kind of an approach to the conflicting, competing claims of the plethora of religions, was embodied in the Western movement, and known as “Deism” or “Natural Theology.” Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Edward Herbert, First Baron of Cherbury, 1582–1648), who led an extremely exciting life, is remembered for his primary work De Veritate, translated into English as On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False (1624), for which he is thought of as the father of English Deism.11 His five principles of religion are well known: (1) belief in the existence of God; (2) the human obligation to worship that God; (3) the identification of worship with virtue or morality, that one must do the good; (4) one’s obligation to repent of sin and abandon it; and (5) there will be a divine recompense in this life or at least an ultimate judgment in the next.
Of course, for some reason the “natural” ideas all sound very “Christian.” We do not hear anything about Buddhism’s Four Passing Sights or Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path. There is no mention here of the greatest self-caused pain being that of wanting things to be permanent, nor anything about Sunyata (emptiness) or the “chain of causation.”12 We hear nothing of the law of karma, or of samsara or of the Dharma. On and on we could list other fundamentals of other religions, to find them also completely absent in this schema of five alleged common or universal beliefs of “natural” religion. Even if the Christian tried to find “faith” as the common element,13 unless it was left completely undefined or contentless, it would not be common. Was Lord Herbert’s Christian environment subconsciously overpowering?
Later, Lord Herbert investigated other religions to some degree, and not unexpectedly found his theory of “Natural Religion” confirmed. Because the new sciences were making the supranatural religions’ claims problematic, many scholars, in subsequent years, including some Christian church leaders as well as critics, re-examined Christianity and its relation to other religions, and to political institutions. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), viewed humans as unfit for political life because incapable of restraining their own interests or of controlling others, so saw the necessity to avoid continual war between everyone as a social contract in which all turned over most of their rights to a sovereign, and the political sovereign would also control religion.14
John Locke, (1632–1704), insisted on a free press as well as freedom of conscience, moving it beyond a mere grudging religious toleration, so furthered the idea of social contract, much more de-centralized than had Hobbes.15 As I will show in detail in a later chapter, Locke laid out his analysis of religion in general and specifically of Christianity in the Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke presupposed most of Lord Herbert’s five beliefs, but he tried to distinguish between propositions that were simply “above reason” and those that were “contrary to reason,” and showed no actual familiarity with non-Christian religions. Though he was not formally a “deist” in the sense of denying revelation, he was otherwise quite critical of certain Christian doctrines such as “original sin.” The world was still quite divided in his panegyric on Christianity, and in a sense, he aligned Christianity with “natural religion” in the fact that even the category of “above reason” was not viewed as defying nature or being unreasonable. John Toland (1670–1722) later pushed deism further with his famous work, Christianity not Mysterious (1696) in which he argued especially against Locke’s category of “above reason” as being the cause of much superstition in religion. He was persuaded, not that reason itself would reveal the ultimate truth, but that once something was regarded as “revelation,” it was certainly reasonable.16 Two deist leaders of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), took quite different positions regarding the value of Christianity. Rousseau attempted to remain a faithful Catholic while insisting that the most credible religious position would have to be deism, but Voltaire belittled the Roman Catholic church while fighting for a religious freedom and separation of church from state. Rousseau explored further the idea of natural rights, the social contract, and articulated a “civil religion” built from the top down. His position of the need for reason, even if one believed in revelation, left any religion gasping for air when he showed how much one would have to understand before one could even make an intelligible choice of which revelation, of what qualified as revelation, and of the various possibilities of interpreting it. So there seemed to be nothing very “natural” in any religion. It was finally Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who saw the ethical imperative as natural and universal or “categorical” and distinguished between religion’s ethical aspects and its non-ethical, which he regarded as “pseudo-religion.” We will show later how he was able to justify certain doctrines within Christianity, but had to qualify others and paint a rather heterodox idea of Christian faith in order even to find it as a possible candidate for an “ethical commonwealth.”
Meanwhile, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) became posthumously a champion of deism or “natural religion,” after necessarily living17 as a theist in conformity with the Christian religion. He finally explicitly distinguished between revealed religion and natural religion, and was convinced that the latter was more credible, that one could be sufficiently religious either by reason or experience. The posthumous publication of his anti-revelation investigation of the life of Jesus had a profound effect on biblical studies.18
By Reimarus’s time, the critical approach to the Christian religion had moved many miles since the Protestant