Rationalism

Rationalism is the theory that assigns undue authority to reason in matters of religion, treating human reason as the final judge of what may be believed.¹ It has taken three historical forms: a Deistical form that denies any supernatural revelation is possible or actual, since reason alone is the source of religious knowledge; a form that admits a real revelation but holds that only the parts of it reason can independently comprehend and demonstrate should be believed; and Dogmatism, which accepts revealed doctrine on authority but insists it must then be raised into philosophical demonstration.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates the term but states the position rationalism denies. General revelation, “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence,” is real but limited: sufficient “to leave men inexcusable,” yet “not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”² Scripture alone supplies “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life,” either “expressly set down or necessarily contained” in it, “unto which nothing at any time is to be added.”³ Rationalism’s claim that reason, unaided or as final arbiter, can reach or correct this counsel on its own is precisely what these two paragraphs deny. Herman Bavinck traces the same claim to its root: a mind that treats itself as answerable to no source outside itself “criticizes all revelation to death,” whether that self-sufficiency is pursued through reason (rationalism) or through feeling (mysticism).⁴

Historical Development

Deistical rationalism in England

The most direct form of rationalism, outright denial that any supernatural revelation is possible or needed, arose in England from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries as the same movement Hodge treats as Deism under another name.⁵ Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who died in 1648, held that all true religion reduces to five self-evident “common notions”: God’s existence, the duty to worship him, that piety consists in virtue, that sin must be repented of, and a future state of reward and punishment; a real revelation, on this view, can do no more than confirm what reason already knows.⁶ Toland, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Collins, Bolingbroke, Tindal, and Hume each carried the same principle further across the next century, with Hume’s own Dialogues on Natural Religion judged by Hodge “the ablest work ever written in support of the Deistical… system.”⁶

Continental spread and the second form

From England the same spirit passed to France, where Voltaire, Rousseau, La Mettrie, Holbach, D’Alembert, and Diderot “succeeded for a time in overthrowing all religious faith in the governing classes of society.”⁷ A different, more common form took hold on the Continent: rather than deny revelation outright, it admitted that the Scriptures contain a real revelation, but held that this revelation merely republishes for the masses truths reason itself could in principle reach and prove; whatever reason cannot demonstrate to its own satisfaction, on this view, may be set aside as an “accommodation” to the limited culture of the biblical writers rather than received as true.⁸

German rationalism and Wolfian Dogmatism

The Continent’s other main channel ran through Germany. Christian Wolf (1679-1754) revived and systematized the older patristic distinction between faith for “the common people” and philosophical knowledge for the educated,⁹ insisting that revealed doctrine, once given, must still be established by “a mathematical or strictly demonstrative dogmatical system, according to the principles of reason.”¹⁰ This third form, which Hodge names Dogmatism, supplied the method that Baumgarten, Ernesti, and Michaelis applied without yet denying Scripture’s authority outright, and that Semler, Morus, and Eichhorn then carried into outright rationalism; by the turn of the nineteenth century “most of the leading church historians, exegetes, and theologians of Germany, were Rationalists.”¹¹ Bavinck narrates the same period from the confessional side: excessive supernaturalism among the Anabaptists and Socinians had already turned into rationalism, an expanding natural theology was judged by German naturalists and English deists to make revelation unnecessary altogether, and it was against this current that Kant’s philosophy provoked theologians to search for nonrational grounds for belief in God.¹²

Kant’s critique and its aftermath

Rationalism’s confidence that reason could demonstrate the truths of natural religion received what Hodge calls its “first serious blow” from Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason argued that reason is incompetent to prove any religious truth at all and relocated the ground of religion in moral consciousness alone, which he took to imply God, freedom, and immortality.⁷ Fichte and Schelling extended Kant’s principles further, denying any real distinction between the knowing subject and the object known and merging both into a single absolute; this idealistic pantheism displaced rationalism from German philosophy’s own throne before yielding, in turn, to a subtler materialism.⁷

Objections and Responses

A supernatural revelation is either impossible or unnecessary, since God, having endowed creation with its own properties, does not interfere in it directly (Deistical Rationalism). Hodge answers that this treats God as remote from a world our own moral consciousness knows he is not: Scripture and experience alike testify to a God “not far from any one of us, in whom we live, move, and have our being.”¹³ A revelation is in any case necessary, not merely possible, since “the heathen nations, ancient and modern, civilized and savage, have without exception, failed by the light of nature to solve any of the great problems of humanity” concerning sin, guilt, and the soul’s future.¹⁴ That the Scriptures are themselves this revelation, Hodge argues from the character of their human authors (too consistently wise and good to have been either fanatics or impostors), the coherence of a text written by some fifty authors across fifteen centuries, fulfilled prophecy, and the Bible’s own transforming effect in history.¹⁵

Only what reason can independently comprehend and demonstrate should be believed; whatever the biblical writers taught that does not meet this test may be set aside as their own accommodation. Hodge replies that this principle, if applied consistently, would abolish belief altogether outside religion as well: no one understands how combustion works, or how like begets like in reproduction, yet everyone believes both occur.¹⁶ Making human intelligence the measure of all truth is, on his description, “an insane presumption on the part of such a creature as man,”¹⁷ and if consistently followed would mean only philosophers could be religious at all, since only they could claim to grasp the rational grounds even of natural religion’s own truths.¹⁷

Revealed doctrine, once accepted on authority, should then be raised by philosophical demonstration from the sphere of faith into that of knowledge (Dogmatism). Hodge grants that this shifts, in practice, onto the same ground as outright rationalism: both make reason’s satisfaction, rather than Scripture’s own testimony, the real ground of assent.¹⁰ It replaces “the well-authenticated testimony of God” with the “quicksand” of one philosopher’s argument, which the next philosopher only supersedes in turn;¹⁸ and it contradicts the Bible’s own account of how its truths are received, since Paul tells the Corinthians that what “God hath revealed… unto us by his Spirit” is known only because “the Spirit searcheth all things,” not because reason has independently verified it (1 Cor. 2:9-11).¹⁹ Historically, Hodge notes, Dogmatism has proved rationalism’s own predecessor rather than its opposite, since a mind trained to demand philosophical proof of revealed doctrine easily becomes a mind that rejects whatever proof it judges insufficient.²⁰

The proper office of reason

Rejecting rationalism in each of these forms does not mean dispensing with reason altogether. Reason is presupposed by any revelation at all, since a truth addressed to no capacity for understanding could not be received as an object of faith in the first place: “Revelations cannot be made to brutes or idiots.”²¹ Reason also retains what Hodge calls the judicium contradictionis, the right to judge whether a claimed revelation is even possible, since “it is impossible that He should require us to believe what contradicts any of the laws of belief which He has impressed upon our nature.”²² And reason must judge whether the evidence offered for a revelation is appropriate and adequate to the kind of truth claimed, historical evidence for historical claims and moral evidence for moral ones, since faith without any evidence at all “is either irrational or impossible.”²³ What reason may not do is make its own present comprehension the measure of what can be true, since believing the incomprehensible is unavoidable even in the ordinary business of life, let alone in the knowledge of an infinite God.¹⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 3, “Rationalism,” 34. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science”: “Deism makes human beings independent of God and the world, teaches the all-sufficiency of reason, and leads to rationalism… Reason criticizes all revelation to death.” ↩
Hodge, 39. ↩
Hodge, 42. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 43. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, 39-40. ↩
Hodge, 44. ↩
Hodge, 46. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 43-44. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 4, “Revelation”: “In Anabaptism and Socinianism, excessive supernaturalism turned into rationalism; among Lutherans and some Calvinists, reason came to have a degree of authority alongside faith. Eventually an expanding natural theology was judged by German naturalists and English deists to make revelation unnecessary. By contrast the influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy led theologians to search for nonrational means of affirming the reality of God.” ↩
Hodge, 35. ↩
Hodge, 36-37. ↩
Hodge, 37-39. ↩
Hodge, 40-41. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 41: “an insane presumption on the part of such a creature as man.” ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 46-47. ↩
Hodge, 47-48. ↩
Hodge, 48-49. ↩
Hodge, 49: “Revelations cannot be made to brutes or idiots.” ↩
Hodge, 51. ↩
Hodge, 53. ↩