The Age of Reason and Capitalism: Christianity in a Godless Age

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At what cost did Christianity turn its back on new learning and the new industrial world order?

    The control of knowledge has always been an issue for the Christian Church.

Across history, the church has alternately encouraged and sponsored the preservation and search for knowledge and suppressed and destroyed it.

Churches in Portugal are decorated with scientific instruments which enabled exploration of the seas (and missionary activity).

The church initially sponsored Copernicus in his studies of the planets.

   In 1615 the Church officially condemned Copernicus’ thesis that the earth revolved around the sun.

In 1633 Galileo was ordered by the Inquisition to recant and never discuss his teaching about the working of the solar system.

Unable to reconcile previous Church doctrine and literal Scriptural teaching with science, the Catholic Church retreated into Dogma and its old techniques to silence new discoveries.

 On October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II formally proclaimed that the Church erred in condemning Galileo. The condemnation resulted from a "tragic mutual incomprehension," said the Pope, and became a symbol of the Church's "supposed rejection of scientific progress."

  It is suggested that this retreat by the Church was a turning point for scholars and ordinary people who turned away from the old world order controlled by the church, to science and a new world order that was at least free-er to explore boundaries of knowledge.

If it wasn’t before, the Church became irrelevant to the lives of the increasingly literate society it sought to control.

   The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation and technology had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spread throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world.

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, moving from village life and farms to cities, from self sufficiency and life around a village church to squalor and disease and godlessness.

    The traditional authority of the church, the village, and the family were being undermined by impersonal factory and city life.

Still locked in a medieval world view, most traditional church groups could offer no answer to the hunger for meaning in the miserable lives of city Unable to cope with religious and political revolutions, the Church was just as unable to cope with the enormous social upheaval faced by ordinary people.

In Ireland, devastated by the potato famine, a number of religious orders arose to care for the poor- e.g. the Irish Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy; Presentation Sisters.

 The inability of the church to respond to the Industrial Revolution, except with calls for increased piety and devotions, led Karl Marx (1818-1883) to accuse religion as conspiring with capitalism because it did nothing for people on earth, but consoled them with a promise of a better afterlife.

   After a personal conversion experience in 1738 John Wesley developed a set of General Rules as a method for salvation.

Wesley, an Anglican clergyman, set out to bring the Church of England into the modern age. However, eventually the movement became a separate sect- the Wesleyan Methodists.

His great contribution was to appoint itinerant, un-ordained preachers who travelled widely to evangelize and care for people wherever they were.

 The Church would go where the people were, rather than wait for them to come to it.

   Wesley focused on personal holiness: wherever one was, one could live by three principles: Do no harm; Do Good; Attend the Ordinances of God.

As systematic as science, it shed the layers of theology and directly appealed to the hearts and minds of ordinary people.

Its appeal was that they needed no church: they preached any where, anytime, in any conditions. In the cramped and sordid slums, this was critical.

    For some fifteen hundred years, Christian society had operated on the presumption that all believed in God and that Revelation, received from God, was the ultimate source of knowledge and Truth.

17 th Century Philosophy, drawing on Rene Descartes's famous “I Think, Therefore I am” stated that knowledge comes from human reason.

God becomes unknowable, if existing at all, and can be known, either through the application of logical argument or empirical examination of the universe.

Revelation is not necessary. God gave humans reason to work out for themselves what they must do.

   The Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment fit together: the philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau who felt that human progress would only come through intellectual and spiritual enlightenment—not blind obedience to authority. Enlightened humanity could bring an end to poverty, injustice, racism, and all the other ills of society.

They were dismayed by the religious and political leaders who claimed to be the special agents of God's revelation in order keep the common people shackled in ignorance.

  In the latter half of the 19th century, atheism rose to prominence under the influence of rationalistic and freethinking philosophers. Many prominent German philosophers of this era denied the existence of deities and were critical of religion, including Ludwig Feuerbach, Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche   It may be more appropriate to consider Nietzsche ‘s declaration that “God is dead "as Nietzsche's way of saying that the conventional Christian God is no longer a viable source of any absolute moral principles.

This of course was the greatest threat and challenge to the Christian Church since the Roman persecutions.

   The Church response to the Enlightenment was varied and not all negative.

It was the church that led the way in the provision of schooling for the masses, especially the poor.

Surrender of Church property in many places of Europe such as France and England, meant that Bishops could focus their energy on spiritual formation and education of their flocks rather than being estate managers.  Many of the abolitionists- of slavery, child labour and emancipists were from Protestant and Catholic traditions.

   While atheism and rationalism were part of the new freedom of speech, the majority of society was still nominally Christian, even if observation of Christian practices fell away, especially in cities.

Some Protestant denominations responded with Evangelical Crusades, to reach people not coming to church and to win back those alienated by Church theological bickering. The Catholic tradition closed ranks and turned in on itself, and still held strict controls over its people in matters of faith and morals. The 18 th and 19 monarchical world view.

th century Catholic Church retained a Medieval, hierarchical and  William Booth (1829-1912) a Methodist preacher, established the Salvation Army to preach and do works of mercy on the streets as well as lighten people’s burdens with music.

   During this period the Christian churches in Britain held "that it was 'wrong for a Christian to meddle in political matters.'...All of the denominations were particularly careful to disavow any political affiliation and he who was the least concerned with the 'affairs of this world' was considered the most saintly and worthy of emulation.

“ This was at odds with many Christian Chartists "Christianity was to them above all practical, something that must be carried into every walk of life. Furthermore there was no possibility of divorcing it from political science Christian groups (Puritans) and individuals advocated the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of children from work in the factories, the emancipation of women, universal suffrage and other causes for social justice in the 19 th century.

   After 1800 the Papacy became the center of conservatism in Europe in reaction against the socialism of the French Revolution and its supporters. Pope Pius VII (1800-23) was stripped of powers by Napoleon but made a striking comeback after Napoleon's fall in 1815 regaining most of the territories in Italy which napoleon had seized.

The "ultramontane" tendency in the Church centralized more power and authority in the Papacy.    Rome established more administrative and doctrinal centralization; established a homogeneous culture, aided especially by universal use of Latin.

It promoted new rites and folk devotions, especially those focused on Mary and other favored saints; promoted pilgrimages to holy sites; promoted many new teaching orders and schools; supported intellectuals and publishing houses.

Above all, Rome cultivated an image of theological, canonical, and moral superiority over other Christian denominations and the secular state.

    The provision of education, and to a degree health services to increase the opportunities for the poor became the focus of Catholic endeavour in the 18 th and 19 th centuries.

Membership of male and female Religious Orders and Lay institutes which opened schools exploded.

As well as the Jesuits, Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian and other order schools opened. This was the time of Catherine McAuley; Nano Nagle; Edmund Rice; Don Bosco; Mary Ward, Elizabeth Seton and Mary MacKillop who established orders to teach the masses.

   The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX in 1864 rejected the liberal doctrines of the modern world. It denounced pantheism, naturalism, nationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, freemasonry, theological rationalism, separation of church and state, removal of public schools from Church control, and other modern views. The Pope claimed for the Catholic Church total control over science and culture nature.

. Liberals viewed this as a declaration of war by the Church on modern civilization. Opponents stressed the Papacy had become intolerant and medieval and largely political in

   In 1869, with the Papal States under threat by soldiers of the kingdom of Italy, Pope Pius IX called the First Vatican Council.

The most significant declaration of that war interrupted council was the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which taught that the Pope, speaking ex cathedra, mistake.

on matters of faith and morals, was incapable of making a The Council also condemned freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and universal suffrage.

 As the 19 th century came to a close, and many other Christian denominations engaged with the inevitable changes facing the world, the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches of the East and Russia turned in on themselves, rejected the new and focused on keeping their own houses in order.