The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason and Christian History

It seems strange to me to get to this stage of my life and to only be discovering actual answers to questions about the evangelical cult that I was born into in 1953. It is very odd indeed to also realize that the bulk of the written material was written before I was born. Still the newer material is nice since as we move forward in time and various archeological digs occur human society finds more and more details into our own history.

For me the strangest thing is to finally get to retirement and now I find after my third spiritual awakening , or whatever you want to call it, I recover that the things I learned as a child, a young adult, and then as an old man are very likely to be fables, myths, and outright forgeries. To say that this is disheartening might just be a bit of an understatement.

If this had not been so much of a central part of my life I doubt I would be looking into it now. I am rather surprised that much of the material available is much older than I might have thought it was. I was surprised after all the essays and books that I had read to find Thanks Paine's book "The Age of Reason" written in the 1790s. Here I found compelling arguments especially in the first section of the book, which was written during the early days of the French Revolution and some of it while he was in prison in France.

I had read Joseph Whelless books written in the late 1920s and much more recent works in the first 20 years of the 21st century. As good as all of those newer books are I think that Paine was truly brilliant. Even so he was not an atheist, though I wonder if he was just unwilling to go that far in his own mind. He talks about natural processes and speaks against any sort of miracles. In today's society he would be an atheist or agnostic. He was a Deist but more on the level of the Star Wars "force" than anything else. His idea of God was rather vague but deliberately so.

It is fascinating that anyone from the American Revolution era was this far along in questioning the more fantastic claims of Christianity, but I understand why he insisted on claiming belief in a benign deity. When you consider that witches were still being killed less than 100 years before his time, a declaration of atheism might have been a dangerous claim to make at that time.

The section at the first half of the book, Part 1, he writes without access to a bible.  Then, for Part 2, he then had a bible and laboriously went through the books and themes of the bible in detail. I found Part 1 much more compelling because it was more of an overview of christianity from his own memory. His overall message was about the basic flaw at the heart of the church: the concept of original sin and the atonement by Christ's death.

In my cult the nuances of original sin were diminished and instead they emphasized personal sins committed by each person. The idea that "all have sinned" was the key, with no real emphasis on Adam's sin.  The flaw in the evangelical cult on this point was the very definite teaching of original sin by the apostle Paul. This is why the book of Genesis is taught as pure history in evangelical churches; on that point alone the entirety of Paul's gospel resides. Even 220 years ago the obvious allegorical nature of Genesis was apparent.

When more liberal Christians ask why evangelicals won't give an inch on the historicity of the book of Genesis, this would be the reason why. For them, they simply have to believe the Hebrew scriptures as history; because of the reliance of the apostle Paul on much of the apparent mythology of Genesis to support his new “revealed” gospel of the blood atonement. 

----- Rev. Dr. Milton David Holmes