This is the seventh session of Bob Godfrey’s Adult Sunday School series at the Escondido URC. In this session he explores the challenges faced by Christendom due to the Enlightenment and how it took shape in America. He argues that Christianity as a personal belief, as a personal commitment to the Word is one thing and the cultural influence of Christianity, Christendom, which dominated the West for 1,700 years, is another. This is not to say that everyone who lived under Christendom was a Christian but that it was a cultural way of seeing the world. That way of seeing the world is collapsing around us. Christianity, however, is doing fine. How did this collapse happen? How should we respond? Before its collapse, there were challenges to Christendom. In session six he looked at the Enlightenment’s political solution to the problems of the world. It sought freedom and defined it as the relative absence of restraint by monarchs and nobility. The French Revolution was the radical form of this quest for political freedom. The American Revolution was of a different, less radical kind. It was not as radically driven by the Enlightenment. In America there was a kind of alliance of Christians (of various kinds, e.g., Witherspoon and Washington) and Enlightenment figures (e.g., Jefferson). What were the effects and the affects of the American Revolution upon American religion in the 18th and 19th centuries?
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- Bob Godfrey On “What’s Going on Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics & Power” (1)
- Bob Godfrey On “What’s Going on Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics & Power” (2)
- Bob Godfrey on “What’s Going On Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics & Power” (3)
- Bob Godfrey on “What’s Going On Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics, & Power” (4)
- Bob Godfrey on “What’s Going On Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics, and Power” (5)
- What’s Going on Right Now: Sex, Race, Politics, & Power with Dr. W Robert Godfrey (6)
- Resources On Christ And Culture
- Resources On The Twofold Kingdom
- The Enlightenment Was Not What You Were Told It Was
- Tillich: Pietism And The Enlightenment Both Fought Against Orthodoxy
- Modernity: The Story Without Its Author
- Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Yale, 1948).
- “‘Magic and Noise:’ Reformed Christianity in Sister’s America,” in eds. R. Scott Clark and Joel E. Kim Always Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey (Escondido: Westminster Seminary California, 2010), 74–91. (Apple Books version)
- Nathan Hatch, Democratization of American Religion
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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