Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics.
Leaders of various movements during the period considered themselves courageous
and elite, taking the world into a new era of progress, free from the long centuries of
doubtful traditions, superstitious irrationality, and political and religious tyranny.
Prominent Enlightenment thinkers, like Voltaire, questioned and attacked existing social
institutions, especially church - state relations. These ideological changes laid the
foundation for sweeping changes across the Occident. Significant thinkers of the period
were Rene Descartes, Benedictus de Spinoza, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, to name a
few. In his famous 1784 essay, What Is Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant said:
Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused
immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use
one’s own understanding without the guidance
of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if
its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack
of determination and courage to use one’s
intelligence without being guided by another.
The motto of enlightenment is therefore:
Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own
intelligence! (Kant, 1874).
The Enlightenment extolled the rational and orderly, the organization of knowledge
and government, and eventually gave birth to Socialism and Capitalism. Geometric
order, rigor and reductionism were seen as virtues of the Enlightenment. This
mechanically precise, or Newtonian universe, had little room for the transcendent, or
supernatural, exalting man as master of his realm. Descartes believed only doubt “would
purge the human mind of all opinions held merely on trust and open it to knowledge
firmly grounded in reason” (Bosch, 2000:349).
The precision and inflexibility of the mechanical paradigm led to excessive
specialization, even in the church, and for many, Deism became popular as a pseudo-
Christian alternative. “To Voltaire and those who shared his views, the Enlightenment
offered emancipation from ‘prone submission to the heavenly will’” (Cragg, 1960:12).
The notion of liberty -- including liberty from the church -- grew in popularity as well.
Scientists found less and less place for God in their constructs. Previously, man owed his
existence to God, but now man was growing ever stronger and wiser, and did need any
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa