Notable Comments
Jonathan Rowe on Sep 15th 2007 12:55 pm |
Check out these thought provoking comments on Positive Liberty, by two learned scholars. First Dr. Gregg Frazer defends his terming the key founders’ creed “theistic rationalism,” and answers why this system which is somewhere between Christianity and Deism, with “rationalism” as the trumping element, is not properly termed “Christian-Deism.”
Also check out Eric Alan Isaacson (who is participating in this very important conference on securities law) ask whether Jesus himself was a Unitarian, and discuss how Joseph Priestly’s Unitarianism made his creed friendlier to Islam.
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Upon further review, I’d like to apologize for labeling Dr. Frazer’s (proprietary?) term “theistic rationalism” as idiosyncratic and imprecise. The imprecision was mine, based on a plain reading, which is to say the contemporary soggy one, of the terms.
“Rationalism” implies a skepticism if not rejection of the miraculous aspects of revelation, but “Theism,” in its stricter sense of a “warm,” personal and providential God, and an openness—albeit not necessarily belief—to revelation, is entirely helpful in contradistinction to deism, which abjures both.
How useful the appellation is (the “so what” question) depends on how many Founders can be claimed for it, how many “scorned and rejected doctrines in general.” Jefferson, and in his later years, John Adams, pass muster; George Washington might make it, although we must imagine him grabbing a Qu’ran as easily as a Bible at his inauguration; Madison is a stretch as he is almost entirely silent on his beliefs. Ben Franklin, based on his autobiography, goes in and out—at one point a deist, by the end of his life open even to the question of Jesus Christ’s divinity. Assorted other Founders might trickle in, but we’re then left with the question of just how many Founders there were besides the marquee names. 50? 100? More?
It was Ben Franklin who urged Tom Paine not to publish his deist manifesto Age of Reason, which I think can be fairly called overtly anti-Christian or at least anti-Biblical, and which caused Paine untold rejection and grief. So too, even Jefferson largely kept his mouth shut about the depth of his theological skepticisms while he was in public life, and even afterward asked at least one penpal to keep them under his hat.
If even these Founders had to keep their “theistic rationalism” quiet, it becomes difficult to discern its effect in a sea of Christian sects that were already in tension, and which decided on a “Judeo-Christianity” which took the various truth claims about the nature of Jesus Christ and much competing dogma and doctrine off the table.
“Theism” is congenial to that, “rationalism” as in rejection of even only parts of the Bible becomes more problematic when viewed in terms of the near-universal condemnation of Tom Paine (including by John Adams). It may be fairly said, as matter of correction to the David Bartons of the world, that the Founding was neither Biblical or theologically Christian; however, its pluralism didn’t extend to anti-Biblicalism or anti-Christianity of Paine’s stripe or any other, and the non-marquee Founders would never have agreed to such a thing.
As for how philosophically or culturally Christian the Founders were, it was John Locke who observed something along the line that we tend to take our assumptions and baselines for granted and are often ignorant of their origins. Could the principles of the Founding (which John Adams explicitly writes are Christian) have been derived in a milieu of “theistic rationalism” absent Christianity? That one must wait for another day, but if not, philosophically-Christian-theistic-rationalist, although an unmanageable mouthful, is also probative.
And yes, Dr. Frazer, “Christian Deism”—as it is neither one, but a hybrid—brings its own set of problems. Your objection to combining the two terms as fundamentally contradictory is unimpeachably precise. But it succeeds as a term of art, as oxymorons must. Jefferson calls himself a Christian at one point (idiosyncratically, of course, but it’s philosophically accurate), and as Jonathan Rowe points out elsewhere, if according to Jefferson the Jews could be deists, a plain reading of “Christian Deism” conveys the meaning in both Jefferson’s mind and for our semantically sloppy times.
Rowe:
But anyway, here is Thomas Jefferson’s definition of Deism in an 1803 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush:
II. JEWS. 1. Their system was Deism; that is, the belief of one only God. But their ideas of him & of his attributes were degrading & injurious.
1. [Jesus] corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief of one only God, (my emphasis) and giving them juster notions of his attributes and government.
Thank you for your kind attention, Dr. Frazer.