Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

‘god’ to keep and to save him.
Freud declared religions to be nothing but an
illusion. Marx saw it as something evil, the
‘opiate of the people.’ Emile Durkheim
suggested that every religious community
was, really, only worshipping itself (Bosch,
2000:269).
The Enlightenment also extolled the notions of natural or self-apparent freedoms like
individual liberty, personal property, and justice for all -- revolutionary concepts
following both feudal and monarchical European social patterns. Enlightenment ideals
became the heart of newly formed governments and figured prominently in critical
documents drafted during the period, among them: the American Declaration of
Independence, the American Constitution of 1787, and the Polish Constitution of May 3,
1791. Many established governments were reordered -- sometimes through extreme
violence -- according to Enlightenment ideals (e.g., France). Political unrest and violent
change became quite common, resulting in the American (1776), French (1787-1799),
Belgian (1792), Italian (1796), Swiss (1798), European (1848), and Russian (1917)
Revolutions, as well as two world wars during the 20th Century, that destroyed much of
Central and Western Europe, and far beyond. Concerning these so-called, self-evident
truths, Newbigin comments:
It would seem that the splendid ideals of the
Enlightenment -- freedom, justice, human
rights -- are not ‘self-evident truth,’ as the
eighteenth century supposed. They seemed
self-evident to a society that had been shaped
for more than a thousand years by the biblical
account of the human story. When that story
fades from corporate memory and is replaced
by another story -- for example, the story of
the struggle for survival in a world whose
fundamental law is violence -- they cease to
be ‘self-evident.’ Human reason and
conscience, it would seem, do not operate in
a vacuum. Their claim to autonomy is
unsustainable. They are shaped by factors that
are in operation prior to the thinking and
experience of the individual. They are shaped
most fundamentally by the story that a society
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa