It is true that on the Deist view, God can also help us in another way. The very contemplation of his goodness in his works inspires us, and energizes us to do his will.
Thus as the calm and most extensive determination of the soul towards the universal happiness can have no other centre of rest and joy than the original independent omnipotent Goodness; so without the knowledge of it, and the most ardent love and resignation to it, the soul cannot attain to its most stable and highest perfection and excellence. [Frances Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, p. 217]
The strength that this can impart to us is not negligible, and perhaps most people will recognize the need for some source like this. But having got this far, it is not clear why something of the same inspiring power cannot come from the contemplation of the order of nature itself, without reference to a Creator. And this idea has recurred in exclusive humanisms.
And so exclusive humanism could take hold, as more than a theory held by a tiny minority, but as a more and more viable spiritual outlook. There needed two conditions for its appearance: the negative one, that the enchanted world fade; and also the positive one, that a viable conception of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations arise such that we could conceive of doing without God in acknowledging and pursuing them. This came about in the ethic of imposed order (which also played an essential role in disenchantment), and in an experience with this ethic which made it seem possible to rely exclusively on intra-human powers to carry it through. The points at which God had seemed an indispensable source for this ordering power were the ones which began to fade and become invisible. The hitherto unthought became unthinkable.[1]
The world continues to live out the fallout produced by the so-called Enlightenment that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries. This new ‘come-of-age’ Gospel has spread far and wide, conquering in many ways, both the West and East. As Charles Taylor likes to say, the secular age is the age of ‘disenchantment’; he identifies this as a major feature of the rise of modernity, post-Enlightenment, which has heretofore led to the current cultural malaise of noxious normative relativism we currently are confronted with on a day-to-day basis. So, this is true; we do inhabit such a world, a world that has ostensibly been exorcised of all of its superstitious ghouls, goblins, and demons; a purely reductive-physicalist and materialist world-explanation.
People in the world today, inclusive of many un-critical Christians, like to think hard-and-fast from the periodization, the slicing and dicing, the Lessing’s ditch of history in such a way that we can tightly conscribe each period of history to some sort of linearly profuse and evolutionary progress of, indeed, coming-of-age. But in reality, to think this way is really only a function of the modernization of the human intellect in the 21st century (and other prior centuries). The Christianly way to think is to think coram Deo, and to understand how God has read and diagnosed the world-situation. To think Christianly, of course, is to think the world from the wisdom of the cross of Jesus Christ. This was God’s pronouncement on all of human postlapsarian history. It required a death, burial, resurrection and ascension of a re-created humanity, in the vicarious humanity of God for us in Jesus Christ, in order to disrupt a human order truly devoid of the Holy Spirit. In this light the Apostle Paul calls the Christian, whether in 1st century Graeco-Roma, or in 21st century globalist society, to do the following: “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”[2]
With the aforementioned tantalized, let’s hear from Karl Barth as he describes how this ‘coming-of-age’ of 18th century Enlightenment optimism clashes with a genuinely lived Christian existence before the living God:
The classical man of the 18th century has this self-confidence, or he believes that he should behave as if he had. The optimistic thesis stands or falls with his absolutism (I am the state). For its sustaining it does not really need either the universe or God. It is valid a priori. Its only primary and essential need is man, who as such stands on the same level with the universe and God, who is able to treat with both on equal terms, and who therefore takes it upon himself to declare the world good in the light of his own goodness. Does he need God in this task? Obviously, only in the second place. The optimists did make use of God, and to their annoyance and disgust the atheists did not. But the optimists, as the system of Wolff reveals,, made use of Him only as an afterthought and not essentially. At a pinch human perfection could be content to be reflected only in the perfection of the world. God could be used but He was not essential. For in spite of all the superlatives there was not to be found in the perfection of God anything basically new or different from that of man. It is undoubtedly the central weakness of the optimistic thesis that it is undertaken in this sovereignty of man it must really be sustained in the same way. It cannot possibly be presented on the basis of divine power and authority, but at best only with a maximum of human self-confidence. Trusting confidently in himself, regarding his five senses and reasoning intelligence and emotional sensibility as his only and secure guide, optimistic man was bold to take the step which according to his philosophy he had to take on this basis, not only distinguishing between good and evil, salvation and perdition, life and death, but also co-ordinating all things, defining and proclaiming the superiority of the one to the other, the victory of light over darkness, and thus rolling away the stone from the entrance to the tomb. That the whole darker side of life consists only in a lack of that which is perfect in itself, that its essential insignificance can be recognized ever more plainly in the freedom of growing knowledge—this triumphant assertion had to be maintained and proved and lived out on his initiative and in his own strength. Nothing could be expected from the Bearer of the divine name, for He had played only an incidental and non-essential role in the framing of the assertion. We recall that in face of the world and man His position is only that of a clockmaker rejoicing in his craft. He has nothing to do directly with the changes in the world within which the life of man is lived. It is a part of the perfection of man and the world that God should be content with a minimum of direct participation in the historical process. Why did not Wolff say point blank that God will refrain from any direct participation? There is certainly no compelling reason to count on it, nor can any promise be given of divine participation in the world of becoming. All that man can be told is that he must use his reason, express his feelings and exercise his will. In fact, the Gospel of optimism can be preached to him only as a system of Law. God will help him only as and to the extent that he helps himself. He is placed in a position of fearful loneliness. For whether he believes in God or not, his relationship to the world is poised on his self-confidence. Existence is rational as and to the extent that he himself is rational. Once he doubts himself, the abyss yawns. From this standpoint we can understand the puppet-like respectability of this man, his stiff rectitude, the outward constraint and narrowness which are so little in keeping with his inner absolutism, the artificial dignity of his bearing. In all these things there is plainly betrayed the anxiety which inevitably accompanies his fundamentally godless self-confidence and its audacities. The scorn and ridicule which the “Sturm und Drang” and the Romantics later heaped upon this attitude were quite uncalled for. Liberation from the conventions of fathers and grandfathers was one thing, but what about the underlying anxiety which had made these conventions necessary? And what about the godless self-confidence which was the real root of this anxiety? But however that may be, the Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation is not menaced by anxiety, and does not need to express itself with this rigidity, because it has nothing whatever to do with that sort of self-confidence. It is based unequivocally on the judgment of the Creator God. It simply expresses that which in obedience to His will must be expressed in relation to His self-revealing activity in the created world. It is not spontaneous exclamation of man proving the world, himself and the world to be grounded. For the God whom it invokes is not the supreme being who may or may not be drawn into the reckoning and referred to, but the free Lord of man and the world who makes Himself responsible for their character, and has disclosed Himself as the Bearer of this responsibility. It is on this basis of His revealed decision that in Christian faith Yes is said to the world, a Yes which is deeply aware of the No, the No being contradicted as the nothingness which it is recognised to be. It may well be that ultimately the optimists of the 18th century meant to echo this divine Yes, this divine overcoming of the No by the Yes. In so far as that was the case, they unconsciously and involuntarily proclaimed an imperishable truth. But in any event they did so most confusedly. And to that extent the Christian affirmation stands out in marked distinction.[3]
Selah
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 233-34 kindle.
[2] Romans 12.1-2, NASB95.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 404-06.