Pelagianism was indeed condemned, but not crushed. There we at least eighteen bishops of Italy who were exiled on account of their refusal to sign the papal decree. After the Council of Ephesus (431), Pelagianism no longer disturbed the Greek Church, so that the Greek historians of the fifth century do not even mention either the controversy or the names of the heresiarchs. But the heresy continued to smoulder in the West with it's main centres in Gaul and Britain.
By the end of the Fifth century, through a process of compromise and conciliation with the teachings of the Bible, Pelagianism spawned Semi-Pelagianism. Those who hold to this doctrine maintain that man needs God's grace to be saved, but that man has the ability within himself to accept or reject that grace. According to semi-Pelagianism, mankind is not dead in its sin, only sick. There remains a moral ability within man, a remnant of virtue hidden in his soul that is unaffected by the Fall by which the fallen sinner still has the inherent ability to incline or move himself to cooperate with God's grace. In other words, man has the ability whereby he can accept God's offer of salvation; or he can reject it. This view makes salvation, not totally dependent upon God's grace as does Augustinianism, but ultimately on man's own choice. It elevates man's responsibility above God's sovereignty in redemption. Grace is necessary but not necessarily effective. Its effect always depends upon the sinner's cooperation with it by virtue of the exercise of the will.
Though Pelagius was condemned as a heretic by Rome, and its modified form, Semi-Pelagianism was likewise condemned by the Council of Orange in 529, the basic assumptions of this view persisted throughout church history to reappear in Medieval Catholicism, Renaissance Humanism, Socinianism, Arminianism, and modern Liberalism. It has been described by Dr. Kenneth Good in these words:

Though it retained much of the philosophical basis of its parent (Pelagianism), as opposed to divine revelation, Semi-Pelagianism compromised with truth sufficiently to gain favorable audience with some Christians. It became, thus, a far more dangerous form of infidelity than its parent. As such, it eventually overcame the Roman Catholic Church and returned it to the very Pelagianism condemned by Augustine. Semi-Pelagianism changed its disguise and further altered its voice at a later date to become known as Arminianism, following some scholastic refinements and adjustments to Christianity. (Kenneth H. Good, Are Baptists Calvinists?, Oberlin, 1975, Regular Baptist Heritage Fellowship, cited in the UnHoly Alliance by Dan S.)

From approximately the Fifth to the Fourteenth century, most of Europe lay under feudalism and the pervasive civil influence and ecclesiastical control of the Roman Catholic Church with its Semi-Pelagian doctrine. The Bible was tenaciously controlled by Roman Catholic monks, priests, bishops, etc., thereby keeping church members as well as the general populace ignorant regarding the Bible's contents. The medieval period has commonly been called the Dark Ages - as if the light of civilization had been unceremoniously snuffed out and was generally characterized by ignorance, immorality, and barbarism. Almost every true doctrine of the Bible was either perverted or lost. (Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, Copyright © 1993, 1994 Compton's NewMedia, Inc.)

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) held that man had revolted against God and thus was fallen, but Aquinas had an incomplete view of the Fall. He thought that the fall did not affect man as a whole but only in part. In his view the will was fallen or corrupted but the intellect was not affected. Thus people could rely on their own human wisdom, and this meant that people were free to mix the teachings of the Bible with the teachings of non-Christian philosophers. Authority of the church took over authority of the Bible and people began to ask if the Bible was really necessary?
Among the Greek philosophers, Aquinas relied especially on one of the greatest, Aristotle. Aquinas brought the Aristotelian emphasis on individual things - the particulars - into the philosophy of the late Middle Ages, and this set the stage for the humanistic elements of the Renaissance and the basic problem they created.

The Reformation was a revival of Augustine's "doctrine of grace over the legacy of the Pelagian view of man.

John Hus (1369-1415)
Hus returned to the teachings of the Bible and of the early church and stressed that the Bible is the only source of final authority and that salvation comes only through Christ and his work. According to Herve Kotasek, a sixteenth-century Czech historian, it was Hus who first gave currency to the notion of Sola Scriptura - Scripture only - a cornerstone of the Reformation. He openly challenged papal exclusivity, he courageously condemned the selling of indulgences, simony, and ecclesiastical larceny, and he forthrightly demanded uncompromising discipleship from every Believer. He exploded popular beliefs and condemned common practices as he stood against the tide of his entire generation.

Throughout the entire fifteenth century, cries for the reformation of the church came from every sector. The church had become impotent; it was entirely unable to halt the rapid slide into the godlessness, materialism, and hedonism of the ancient pagan philosophies. The authority of the church was asserted to be equal to, or greater than, the authority of the Bible and human works were emphasized as a basis for meriting the merit of Christ. Slowly but surely, the church had lost its grip.

It was the humanists of that time who, under the enthusiasm for the classics, spoke of what had immediately preceded them as a "Dark Age" and talked of a "rebirth" in their own era. The Renaissance was not the rebirth of man; it was the rebirth of an idea about man. There was a change in thinking about man, a change which put man himself in the center of all things. Harkening back to the pre-Christian era, they visualized man as taking a great forward leap. The concept of autonomous man was growing. In other words, humanism in the form it took in the Renaissance (and after the Renaissance) was being born.

The Reformers took seriously that man needs the answers given by God in the Bible to have adequate answers not only for how to be in an open relationship with God, but also for how to know the present meaning of life and how to have final answers in distinguishing between right and wrong. That is, man needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood.

Remember that to Thomas Aquinas the will was fallen after man had revolted against God, but the mind was not. This eventually resulted in people believing they could think out the answers to all the great questions, beginning only from themselves.

Beginning with man alone and only the individual things in the world (the particulars), the problem is how to find any ultimate and adequate meaning for the individual things. The most important individual thing for man became man himself.

Few disagreed on the fact that the church needed to be reformed. What they disagreed on was what reform should entail and how it was to be effected. In frustrated tension, dozens of competing factions, sects, schisms, rifts, and divisions roiled just beneath the surface of the church's tranquility for decades. Finally, on October 31, 1517, those pent-up passions burst out into the open when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Palast Church in Wittenberg.

Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Luther preached that only faith could lead to salvation, without the mediation of clergy or good works. It was clearly a rejection of the teaching that man contributes something to his salvation, by human act or deed we merit the merit of Christ. He attacked the authority of the Pope, rejected priestly celibacy, and recommended individual study of the Bible (which he translated, c 1525).

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
The Dutch Humanist, bound in Roman tradition revived Pelagianism, rejecting the falleness of man. Man is sick but not dead. Erasmus contended that salvation is a cooperative enterprise of God and man, even though man's share in it is small. Given the opportunity, man will chose God.

The Renaissance humanism steadily evolved toward modern humanism -a value system rooted in the belief that man is his own measure, that man is autonomous, totally independent.

Contrary to common interpretation, the banner of the Protestant Reformation period was not "justification by faith." Rather it was "justification by grace through faith" built upon a solid foundation of the truths of God's sovereign electing grace and man's ruin as recorded in the Bible (Ephesians 2:8,9). No Pelagian error would be tolerated here! Man did not possess free will, but was helplessly bound in sin. God's grace (unmerited favor) was the cause of redemption, faith but the means. While this may seem like a subtle or unimportant semantic difference, the religious consequences of this distinction are profound.

John Calvin (1509-1564)
The father of Reformed and Presbyterian doctrine and theology. Calvin asserted that since the fall of Adam and Eve, every aspect of humans are corrupted, including our reason and will. In the same vein of Augustine and Luther, Calvin stated that humans are not capable of knowing and choosing God. Instead, the sovereign God has His absolute plan of salvation. He said God's elect were predestined for salvation and good conduct and success were signs of election. The formal principle and source of Calvin's theological system is embodied in the Latin phrase sola Scriptura (Scripture only). He rejected the medieval fourfold interpretation which allowed allegorizing, spiritualizing, and moralizing, insisting that the literal meaning of the words was to be taken in their historical context.

Listen to the concluding remarks of Martin Luther as he argues against the Dutch humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, and semi-pelagianism in his magnum opus--The Bondage of the Will.

Now, my good Erasmus, I entreat you for Christ's sake to keep your promise at last. You promised that you would yield to him who taught better than yourself. Lay aside respect of persons! I acknowledge that you are a great man, adorned with many of God's noblest gifts--wit, learning and an almost miraculous eloquence, to say nothing of the rest; whereas I have and am nothing, save that I would glory in being a Christian. Moreover, I give you hearty praise and commendation on this further account--that you alone, in contrast with all others, have attacked the real thing, that is, the essential issue. You have not wearied me with those extraneous issues about the Papacy, purgatory, indulgences and such like--trifles, rather than issues--in respect of which almost all to date have sought my blood (though without success); you, and you alone, have seen the hinge on which all turns, and aimed for the vital spot. (Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, translated by J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston, Old Tappan, 1957, Fleming H. Revell Co.)

This "vital spot" to which Luther refers was the biblical truth concerning man's lost and sin-bound condition in contrast to any and all forms of Pelagian heresy. Luther was convinced that this doctrine was vital to the truth of the Gospel, and that its absence had formed the seedbed for various types of pseudo-Christianity.

Modern Evangelicalism sprung from the Reformation whose roots were planted by Augustine. But today the Reformational and Augustinian view of grace is all but eclipsed in Evangelicalism. Where Luther triumphed in the sixteenth century, subsequent generations gave the nod to Erasmus.

Puritanism was a loosely organized reform movement originating during the English Reformation of the 16th century. The name came from efforts to "purify" the Church of England by those who felt that the Reformation had not yet been completed. Eventually the Puritans went on to attempt purification of the self and society as well.
The theological roots of Puritanism may be found in Reformed theology, in a native dissenting tradition stretching back to John Wycliffe and the Lollards, but especially in the theological labors of first-generation English reformers. From William Tyndale the Puritans took an intense commitment to Scripture and a theology which emphasized the concept of covenant; from John Knox they absorbed a dedication to thorough reform in church and state; and from John Hooper they received a determined conviction that Scripture should regulate ecclesiastical structure and personal behavior alike.

- - - - - R A T I O N A L I S M - - - - -

Rationalism rejected the inerrancy of scripture and miracles. Philosophical rationalism shares the conviction that reality is actually rational in nature and that making the proper deductions is essential to achieving knowledge.
Non-Christian philosophers from the time of the Greeks until just before our modern period had three things in common. First, they were rationalists. That is, they assumed that man (though he is finite and limited) can begin from himself and gather enough particulars to make his own universals. Rationalism rejects any knowledge outside of man himself, especially any knowledge from God.
The second point they had in common was that they took reason seriously. They accepted the validity of reason - that the mind thinks in terms of antithesis. That is, with their minds people can come to the conclusion that certain things are true while certain other things are not true, that certain things are right in contrast to other things that are wrong.
Third, in addition to being rationalists who believed in the validity of reason, non-Christian philosophers prior to the eighteenth century also were optimistic. They thought they could and would succeed in their quest to establish by reason alone a unified and true knowledge of what reality is. When that happened, satisfying explanations would be on hand for everything people encountered in the universe and for all that people are and all that they think. They hoped for something which would unify all knowledge and all of life. (Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, pp. 145-46.)

Lutheran and Arminian doctrines and their effect on worship.

Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609)
Jacob Arminius was a strong advocate of Dutch Reformed theology--a system of teaching held by the followers of John Calvin in Holland. Ultimately chosen to write a defense against attacks upon these beliefs, Arminius came to the conclusion that some of Calvin's tenets were indefensible. However, in rejecting the excesses of Calvinism, and in the attempt to construct his own scheme of beliefs, Arminius drew upon both Semi-Pelagianism and the Bible to create a new theological hybrid--subsequently dubbed "Arminianism."
He sought to create a consistent interpretation of the Christian religion without forfeiting the free will foundation. According to his theory, man's will was once hindered, but God restores to all men adequate freedom (free will) so that they can determine their own destiny. As a synthesis of humanistic Semi-Pelagianism and the Bible, Arminianism insists that any movement toward God is man's ultimate decision, and that God simply acts in light of that decision. Consequently, man is sovereign!

Arminianism

Coming from humanistic Pelagianism instead of from the Scriptures, Arminianism bases salvation upon the will of fallen man. It is anti-sovereignty, anti-security, anti-dispensational, anti-grace, pro-works religion. The teaching is that God, through redemption, bestows a 'common grace' upon all men, thereby making it possible for the individual to exercise his free will either for, or against God. Its maxim is, "It is mine to be willing to believe, and it is the part of God's grace to assist."
Thus the sinner's choice of God, and not God's choice of the sinner, is the ultimate factor in salvation. Those elected by God are chosen only in the sense that He foresaw their faith and good works--which arise from themselves and are not wrought of God. The human will is exalted to the place of sovereignty and, according to this system, man is his own saviour.
In that the Arminian begins on the premise of his own free will, his end is on the same assumption. He feels that since he can come in, he can therefore go out, by his free will. What little assurance of salvation he has is founded upon his own momentary merit, plus whatever emotional experiences he can muster along the way. "After I accepted Jesus I wasn't sure if I was really saved; but when I had my 'baptism in the Holy Ghost,' and spoke in tongues, then I was sure." Consequently the Arminian's existence is experienced-based, only to be beset by fears, uncertainties, backslidings, and failure.
Unconditional eternal security grounded upon the fact of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ is utterly rejected by the Arminian. He sedulously avoids all portions of the Bible that establish eternal security, or at best seeks to discredit and deny them. He gravitates to out-of-context verses that seem to him to militate against the truth of "once saved, always saved." (Miles J. Stanford, Tri-13 - Arminius, to Calvin, to Paul, Lakewood: Christian Correspondence, 1983.)

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Modern philosophy is generally said to have begun with Rene Descartes. Descartes enumerated that innate ideas are those that are the very attributes of the human mind, inborn by God. As such these "pure" ideas are known a priori by all humans, and are thus believed by all. Descartes believed that, without innate ideas, no other data could be known.
He was supremely confident that by human thought alone one could doubt all notions based on authority and could begin from himself with total sufficiency. He concluded that with the reality of doubt nothing could be accepted which one could not be certain. Thus began a shift of interest from theological themes to a study of nature and of man without explicit reference to God.

John Locke (1632-1704)
Locke was the English philosopher often associated with early modern empiricism and a staunch defender of free inquiry. His study of Descartes awakened his interest in philosophy, while his study of Hobbes helped form his ideas. Locke depicted the human mind as a blank slate, a sheet of white paper "void of all characters, without any ideas."

While John Locke and Francis Bacon have been associated with the empiricist approach, David Hume (1711-1776) is the clearest representative of empiricism. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume maintained that all of one's knowledge of the world is the product of experience. While man can know the relation between ideas with certainty, their actual reality cannot be established beyond probability. Thus, the true nature and scope of ordinary and scientific knowledge can be revealed only by a "science of man," founded on experience and observation.

- - - - - - - T h e  E n l i g h t e n m e n t - - - - - - -

The Enlightenment may be represented as a new way of thinking about mankind. The main proponents of this intellectual movement, the philosophes, were primarily men of letters - men like Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau - but their views stemmed from the scientific revolution of the previous century. The discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and Newton in physics and cosmology revealed a universe that was infinite, yet governed by universal laws that could be discovered by the human intelligence. The philosophes were convinced that all creation was similarly rational, so that it was possible for man to uncover laws which regulated society, politics, the economy, even morality. Once understood, these laws would teach mankind not only what we are, but what we ought to be and to do.

Taking their cues primarily from ancient Greece and Rome, the leaders of the epoch were not so much interested in the Christian notion of progress as they were in the heathen ideal of innocence. In France, Rousseau and Voltaire led the attack on the church and institutional Christianity. At the same time they both professed belief in a Supreme Being. Rousseau's religion denounced all creeds beyond the assertion that natural religion was based on feeling and that all beliefs should be brought "to the bar of reason and conscience." Voltaire, on the other hand, professed a theism based on the order and rationality of the world. "Just as a watch proves a watchmaker, so a universe proves a God." On this basis Voltaire urged tolerance of all religions except that of the institutionalized church.

Humanism reached its pinnacle during the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Literature celebrated the supremacy of man's reason and placed humanity at the center of the universe. The worth of earthly existence for its own sake was accepted, and the otherworldliness of medieval Christianity was disparaged. Writers and poets denied their need for redemption and proclaimed man's right to absolute freedom. Humanists believed that the pursuit of secular life was not only proper but even meritorious.

Deism maintained that a rational view of the universe and of man is that God exists, that He created the universe, that the universe is governed by laws inherent in its structure, and that these laws do not permit the departure from them which is seemingly implied in miracles and the Christian revelation.

Unitarianism in the hands of Joseph Priestly and others became more rationalistic and less supernaturalistic in its outlook. Nature and right reason replaced the NT as the primary source of religious authority, and what authority the Scriptures retained was the result of their agreement with the findings of reason.
Unitarianism came to New England as early as 1710, and by 1750 most of the Congregational ministers in and around Boston had ceased to regard the doctrine of the Trinity as an esential Christian belief. In 1788 King's Chapel, the first Anglican church in New England, became definitely Unitarian when its rector, with the consent of the congregation, deleted from the liturgy all mention of the Trinity. The triumph of Unitarianism in New England Congregationalism seemed complete with the election of Henry Ware, an avowed opponent of the Trinitarian position, to the Hollis chair of divinity at Harvard.

The First Great Awakening (1735-1743)
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century what was called the Great Awakening broke out among the Reformed and Presbyterians in New Jersey and among the Congregationalists in the Connecticut Valley. The First Awakening brought to an end the Puritan conception of society as a beneficial union of ecclisiastical and public life. The leaders of the Awakening called for purity in the churches, even if it meant destroying Puritanism's historically close association between church and state.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
Under Edward's leadership many New England Congregationalists and middle colony Presbyterians moved toward an ideal of a "pure church," the conviction that only professed believers should participate in the Lord's Supper or take their places as full members of a local congregation.
Edwards argued that the "will" was an expression of the whole person which always followed the hearts strongest motives. The hearts ultimate motives were selfish and turned from God because of humanity's participation in Adam's fall, until God's sovereign grace brought about a change in the heart.

George Whitefield (1714-1770)
Whitefield preached that salvation belonged completely to God, and that humans did not possess the natural capacity to turn to Christ apart from God's saving call.

John Wesley (1703-1791)
Son of an Anglican minister, he also became a minister in the Anglican Church (Church of England). In time Wesley, with the aid of the theologian John W. Fletcher, embraced and incorporated both Arminianism and the spirit of the Enlightenment into his Wesleyan movement--Methodism.
Wesley's theology affirms God's sovereign will to reverse our "sinful, devilish nature," by the work of his Holy Spirit, a process he called prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace. Prevenient or preventing grace for Wesley describes the universal work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and lives of people between conception and conversion. Original sin makes is necessary for the Holy Spirit to initiate the relationship between God and people. Bound by sin and death, people expereince the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit, which prevents them from moving so far from "the way" that when they finally understand the claims of the gospel upon their lives, he guarantees their freedom to say yes.
Although free will is an issue, in many respects Calvinism and Wesleyism is not far apart. Wesley stated that he and Calvin were but a hair's breadth apart on justification. Sanctification, not free will, draws the clearest line of distinction.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Rousseau viewed primitive man, "the noble savage," as superior to civilized man. He wrote, "If man is good by nature, as I believe to have shown him to be, it follows that he stays like that as long as nothing foreign to him corrupts him."
Rousseau and his followers began to play down reason, and they saw the restraints of civilization as evils: "Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!" Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We must understand that the freedom he advocated was not just freedom from God or the Bible but freedom from any kind of restraint - freedom from culture, freedom from any authority, an absolute freedom of the individual - a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
He wrote in 1784 that enlightenment is mans emergence from immaturity. It is man learning to think for himself without relying on the authority of the church, the Bible, or the state to tell him what to do. No generation should be bound by the creeds and customs of bygone ages. To be so bound is an offense against human nature, whose destiny lies in progress.
In order to rescue science and philosophy from skepticism while at the same time preserving humanistic assumptions, Kant removed the form and structure of reality from their precarious place in a problematic external world and established them within the mind of man. The patterns that science studies, the dynamic orderliness of nature which rewards the efforts of science, are not the result of habit and custom as David Hume had proposed. Instead, Kant now argued, this order originates in the mind of the observer. This subjective ordering process is the condition for perception itself. Kant called this "the transcendental unity of apperception" (T.U.A.). All of a sudden the mind contained the creative power which produces what we know as "reality."
What reality is, what "things in themselves" are, cannot be known. What we "know" is made possible not by God, not by the mind's penetration of a real world, but by the mind's projections of what we can know upon an essentially unknowable world. Kant placed God, the soul, moral freedom, and the like in the realm of the unknowable "things in themselves." This conceptual framework became known as phenomenalism, a foundation stone within the German school of idealism.

In the French Revolution, human reason was made supreme and christianity was pushed aside. In 1789, with the French Revolution at its height, the members of the National Assembly swore to establish a constitution: The Declaration of the Rights of Man. To make their outlook clear, the French changed the calendar and called 1792 the "year one," and destroyed many of the things of the past, even suggesting the destruction of the cathedral at Chartres. They proclaimed the goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and in other churches in France, including Chartres. In Paris, the goddess was personified by an actress, Demoiselle Candeille, carried shoulder high into the cathedral by men dressed in Roman costumes.
Like the humanists of the Renaissance, the men of the Enlightenment pushed aside the Christian base and heritage and looked back to the old pre-Christian times. When the French Revolution tried to reproduce the English conditions without the Reformation base, but rather on Voltaire's humanistic base, the result was a bloodbath and a rapid breakdown into the authoritarian rule of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).
In Sept. 1792 began the massacre in which some 1,300 prisoners were killed. Before it was all over, the government and its agents killed 40,000 people, many of them peasants. Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), the revolutionary leader, was himself executed in July 1794. This destruction came not from outside the system; it was produced by the system.
The influence of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as seen within the context of the French Revolution, can hardly be overestimated. Within a period of two years, an extreme form of democracy had been established and all titles of privilege abolished. In subsequent decades, based on the achievements of the revolution, political theorists began suggesting even more dramatic changes in government--changes that in the 20th century are called socialism, Communism, and anarchism. It is no exaggeration to say that subsequent revolutions in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917, had their antecedent in the ideas and practices that were spawned by the French Revolution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
A child of the Puritans, Emerson fathered a cultural tradition his spiritual ancestors might well have deplored. He helped to sever the final ties of that tradition to the historic Christian faith, and he is considered the central figure in the birth and growth of a distinct American literature.
Emerson trained for the ministry, but even though the Unitarianism of his day required little specific theological commitment, Emerson found even its limited requirements stifling. Emerson questioned both the morality and efficacy of any historical event or ritualistic practice that claimed in any way to mediate the soul's direct experience of God. He resigned his own pastorate in 1832 in a dispute over the Lord's Supper.

Nathaniel Taylor (1786-1858)
Founder of the New Haven Theology, he contributed to the rise of evangelical theology by modifying Calvinism, rendering it compatible with revivalism in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. His conviction was that individuals always possessed a "power to the contrary" when facing moral choices leading him to a full belief in human free will. He insisted that men are lost but denied that Adam's sin was imputed to all men and that everyone inherits a sinful nature which causes one to sin. Even though a person sins, he has power to do otherwise, thus remaining morally responsible. While Edwards and Whitefield had stressed the inability of sinful people to save themselves in order to preserve God's sovereignty in salvation, Taylor and the leading revivalists on the frontier tended to stress more the ability which God had bestowed on all people to come to Christ. The will was an independent arbiter which chose among options presented to it by the mind and the emotions.

Kant's influence on the modern world was immense, and it is no exaggeration to say that he dominated the nineteenth century. Some scholars argue that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are footnotes to Kant. His epistemology laid the goundwork for an artistic and intellectual response, known as the Romantic movement, which swept the Western world. The Romantics too would open some terrible new doors, the implications of which they would not fully realize until it was too late.
The Romantics were a group of influential avant-garde thinkers, poets, and artists of the nineteenth century who strongly felt the diminished portion of reality with which they were left. They were given a reductionism coming from the eighteenth century that was antimetaphysical. Its hard, natural determinism and unfeeling, soulless universe left them with an impoverished vision of life. The Romantics did not question the humanistic and naturalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment. They merely sought to reverse the tendency toward impersonality by asserting the value of private experience over and above what was mere scientific fact. Hume had shrunken the universe with his unyielding skepticism. Mystery was gone. Now Kant was giving the Romantics new room to breathe. They loved Kant's idea about the mind creating reality. Hegel's influence after Kant marked the era of a new optimism, but this solipsism had not only an up side, it had a downside as well.

Charles Finney (1792-1875) claimed that it is possible for humans to reach the standard of God on our own will. The Positive Thinking Movement can be traced back to the revivalism of Finney, whose emphasis on the human element in conversion and the ability of men to create revivals. Between 1824 and 1832, Finney established the modern forms and methods of revivalism in American.

By the time Nietzsche entered the philosopher's chair, he took Kant a step farther and held "mere scientific fact" - indeed, the scientific undertaking itself - in complete contempt. Nietzsche was the one to rub the implications of what had happened over the past centureis into the faces of his contemporaries. He bemoaned the desolating universe that he and his contemporaries had inherited from his predecessors. It was Nietzsche who declared "God is dead!"

The stern doctrines of Calvinism bred in believers a relentless commitment to one's earthly calling and an avoidance of trivial pleasures. The result was, in Protestant nations, the rapid accumulation of capital that has made possible the enormous structure of modern economic life.

The Romantics no longer needed to worry about a sovereign, transcendent, and moral God looking over their shoulders. They gloried in their initial freedom. Now they could go on a binge and taste all of life's little delicacies. The English Romantics from Coleridge to Carlyle were swept up in this celebratory frenzy. Soon it spread from them to America, where it was seized upon by the New England transcendentalists: Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. Thoreau was to assert in Walden that "The universe constantly and obediently answers our conceptions ... Let us spend our lives in conceiving them." Man can create the universe he so desires simply by revolutionizing his thinking, Thoreau observed, marking the early beginnings of "consciousness-raising."
Nature began to be regarded as somehow divine. It was a tabloid for the sacred experience. Pantheism crept in. By the time the first translations of Hindu and Buddhist texts were made in the nineteenth century, there was an immediate influence on Western minds. Walt Whitman applauded these new mystical breakthroughs in his celebrated poem "Song of Myself." Whitman announced to the world: "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from."
The Romantic movement introduced patheism as a result of Kant's thought, and with that came the effort to lay aside traditional conceptions of good and evil. These categories were seen as limitations upon human consciousness and its quest for unlimited experiences. Later on in the nineteenth century, the very terms "good and evil" were made irrelevant by persistent reductive analyses of experience. The most famous and influential of these came through the Englishman Walter Pater in his critical work The Renaissance. Pater sought to isolate value judgment from experience. He extracted the teeth from moral judgment by saying that "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."

Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism took the Eastern holy books, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which had recently been translated into English, and created what religious historian J. Gordon Melton has called "a uniquely American form of mysticism ... the first substantial religious movement in North America with a prominent Asian component."
It's distinct leader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called it "the Saturnalia or excess of Faith." The power of thinking, whether negative or positive, was believed to be sufficient even to create physical reality or to destroy it.
Transcendentalism broke with Unitarianism for two reasons. First, they objected to the Unitarian desire to cling to certain particulars of Christian history and dogma. Emerson called this clinging a "noxious" exaggeration of "the personal, the positive, the ritual," and he asked instead for a direct access to God, unmediated by any elements of Scripture and tradition. Secondly, the transcendentalists lamented the sterility of belief and practice they found in the Unitarian faith. According to Henry David Thoreau, it is not man's sin but his boredom and weariness that are "as old as Adam." The American Adam needs to exchange his bondage to tradition for a freedom to experiment: "old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."
Transcendentalism helped spawn what became known as New Thought, which emphasized that thought controls everything. Now called Positive Thinking, Possibility Thinking, Positive Confession, Positive Mental Attitude, and Inner Healing, this New Thought is sweeping today's church. New Thought became the basis for such cults as Christian Science, Religious Science, and Unity.
Its direct influence was confined to a small circle, but it had wide repercussions. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, several of the transcendentalists were important participants in the abolitionist movement, and in the decades to follow, widely divergent individuals and movements would find inspiration in the transcendental protest against society. Henry Ford, who once said "history is bunk" and declared Emerson's essays to be his favorite reading, dwelt upon the transcendentalists' disdain for convention and their exaltation of self-reliant power, while both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King drew deeply upon the resources of Thoreau's famous essay, "Civil Disobedience."
Transcendentalism marked the first substantial attempt in American history to retain the spiritual experience and potential of the Christian faith without any of the substance of its belief. By claiming an essential innocence for man, by substituting a direct intuition of God or truth for any form of revelation, and by foreseeing a future of ill-defined but certain glory for humankind, transcendentalism paved the way for the many romantic notions about human nature and destiny that have become such a central part of the American experience in the last hundred years.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish lay theolgian and unintentional founder of existentialism. He viewed the search for meaning or value as a struggle between non-reason and reason. He argued that each individual must choose - consciusly and responsibly - among the alternatives that life brings. He saw optimism to be in the area of non-reason.

Vatican Council I (1869-1870)
The Catholic Church needed to re-gather the church and reaffirm its faith, its authority, and in particular its head, the papacy. Convened by Pope Pius IX in Rome, it was the first to meet since the Council of Trent, which had responded to the sixteenth century Protestant movement. Vatican I sought to define authoritatively the church's doctrine concerning the faith and the church, especially in response to new challenged from secular philosophical and political movements and theological liberalism. The council completed only two major doctrinal statements and is remembered almost exclusively for its doctrinal definition of papal infallibility.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
As a result of the cumulative scientific, economic, and political changes of the preceding eras, the idea took hold among literate people in the West that continuing growth and improvement was the usual state of human and natural life. In his book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin set forth the concept that all biological life came from simpler forms by a process called "the survival of the fittest." This intellectual challenge to Christianity sought to discredit the creation account in the Bible and replace it with his theory of evolution.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," extended the theory of biological evolution to all of life, including ethics. Because of their desire to find a unifying principle that would enable autonomous man to explain everything through naturalistic science, that is, on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, they extended biological evolution to "social Darwinism." This had become the frame of reference by which they attempted to give unity to individual things, the particulars, to the details of the universe and to the history of man. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) went even further than Spencer in applying these concepts to the advance of groups. Thus these concepts opened the door for racism and the noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth to be sanctioned and made respectable in the name of "science."

Because the Enlightenment sees man not as social by nature but as merely sociable, his relations to others do not arise from his nature and the demands of the common good but solely from his freely given consent. This is the origin of the "pro-choice" mentality. The expectant mother is an autonomous indivdual owing no duty to her child except as she chooses to consent. Marriage implies no inherent stabiliy of relationship. Rather, it is up to each spouse to decide whether it will be permannent or temporary, monogamous or adulterous. The goal is self-fulfillment of the isolated individual unencumbered by any inherent duties or relations to others.

As the Age of Reason made pronouncements about the validity or invalidity of various approaches to knowledge, the arena of phiosophic inquiry shifted from ontology - the study of the nature of being and reality - to epistemology - the theory of knowlege. Thinking shifted from the study of God to the study of the human mind and its capacities and limitations in apprehending reality.
The Bloomsbury Fabians of London were an elite intelligentsia of world socialists who envisioned an end to war and poverty by a united world order dedicated to the ideals of socialistic humanism. Unlike Marxists, who advocated bloody revolution for world socialism, the Fabian Socialists of Britain advocated a more gradualist path to socialistic globalism. The plan of these early one-worlders was to use intellectual penetration, from the top of the pyramid down, into key areas of influence on society.
One of the most effective Fabians was famed Cambridge University economist John Maynard Keynes who turned Harvard on its ears when he came and charmed the students and faculty with his socialist economics. Keynes said that the state should guarantee welfare for all, that it should provide guaranteed employment through government programs, and that all of this could be financed by his revolutionary scheme. How? By turning paper into gold. The gold standard could be dropped for paper currency, then deficit spending through government loans would open up a money vault of endless supply. Indeed, it was a "New Deal," to use the Roosevelt expression - maybe too good a deal to be true.

Both the Nineteenth century Holiness movement (e.g. Nazarene denomination) and the Twentieth century Pentecostal movement find their roots in Methodism. Pentecostal historian, Vinson Synan, succinctly described the relationship as follows:
Although the Pentecostal movement began in the United States, itself a significant fact, its theological and intellectual origins were British. The basic premises of the movement's theology were constructed by John Wesley in the Eighteenth century. As a product of Methodism, the holiness-Pentecostal movement traces its linage through the Wesleys to Anglicanism and from thence to Roman Catholicism. This theological heritage places the Pentecostals outside the Calvinistic, Reformed tradition which culminated in the Baptist and Presbyterian movements in the United States. The basic Pentecostal theological position might be described as Arminian, perfectionistic, premillennial, and charismatic.
Pentecostalism was an evangelical charismatic reformation movement which usually traces its roots to an outbreak of tongue-speaking in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 under the leadership of Charles Fox Parham, a former Methodist preacher. It was Parham who formulated the basic Pentecostal doctrine of 'initial evidence' after a student in his Bethel Bible School, Agnes Ozman, experienced glossolalia.
Though Pentecostals recognize sporadic instances of tongue-speaking and other charismatic phenomena throughout the Christian era, they stress the special importance of the Azusa Street revival, which occurred in an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Los Angeles from 1906 to 1909 and which launched Pentecostalism as a worldwide movement. The Azusa Street services were led by William J. Seymour, a black Holiness preacher from Houston, Texas, and a student of Parham.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)
One of the leading exponents of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre began to develop his existentialist philosophy during the 1930s, which stressed personal freedom and stated that the individual exists only in relation to other people.
Sartre's concept was that a finite point is absurd if it has no infinite reference point. If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong.
He held in the area of reason everything is absurd, but nonetheless a person can authenticate himself by an act of the will; everyone should abandon the pose of spectator and act in a purposeless world. But because, as Sartre saw it, reason is separated from this authenticating, the will can act in any direction. On the basis of his teaching, you could authenticate yourself either by helping a poor old lady along the road at night or by speeding up your auto and running her down.

The Scopes Trial in 1925 accelerated the process of withdrawal and separation of Evangelicals from society. The so-called "Monkey Trial" pitted evolution and biblical creationism against each other. H.L. Mencken and others in the secular press heaped ridicule upon the Fundamentalists. Creationists won the court case in Dayton, Tennessee, but Fundamentalists lost the larger battle. The press-generated image of the Fundamentalists as a backwoods ignoramus was locked indelibly in the American consciousness.

Social Gospel Movement
Toward the end of the 19th century, liberal forces arose within American Protestantism that turned from belief in the traditional orthodox Christian doctrines. Many liberal Protestants shifted the emphasis away from personal salvation toward an effort to redeem society. The Social Gospel was a movement away from seeing individual man as sinful and in need of personal salvation. Social Gospel preachers pointed to societal evil and called on individuals to join together and, with God's help, eradicate the evil forces that were at work in corporate society. Evil forces in society were seen as corrupting the individual. Humans were essentially good. Society was evil.
These advocates of social reform undertook to clear slums, to end child labor practices and to eliminate a host of other social evils. They put a major emphasis on education. If society could be redeemed humankind could create a perfect habitat here on this earth.

Mormonism
Also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The LDS God at one time was a mortal man, who by obeying the laws of the Mormon "gospel" became God. In His rise to Godhood He kept His physical body, or so the LDS church teaches. In perhaps the most famous of all Mormon discourses, Joseph Smith plainly declared his belief that God had been a man: "God enthroned in yonder heavens...if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form" (Journal of Discourses, Vol.6,pg.3). Brigham Young stated that "God was once a man in mortal flesh as we are" (Journal of Discourses, Vol.7,pg.333). One of the original LDS apostles felt that "The Gods who dwell in the Heaven...were one in a fallen state...their terrestrial bodies after suffering death, were redeemed, and glorified, and made Gods...they were exalted also, from fallen men to Celestial Gods" (The Seer, Orson Pratt, pg. 23). McConkie declared, "God himself, the father of us all, is a glorified, exalted, immortal resurrected Man!" (Mormon Doctrine, pg. 643). One LDS writer says, "Through modern revelation we learn that the universe is filled with vast numbers of intelligences...Elohim is God simply because all of these intelligences honor and sustain Him as such" (The First 2000 Years, W. Cleon Skousen, Bookcraft, 1953, pf. 355). He goes on to say, "The present exalted position of our Heavenly Father was gradually built up...if He should ever do anything to violate the confidence or 'sense of justice' of these intelligences, they would promptly withdraw their support, and the 'power' of God would disintegrate" (ibid).
The Mormon church claims that men now living can also attain godhood. The Doctrine & Covenants says of those who obey the laws of Mormonism, "Then shall they be gods" (Section 132:20). The late Elder James Talmage declared, "In spite of the opposition of the sects, in the face of direct charges of blasphemy, the church proclaims the eternal truth: 'As man is, God once was; as God is, man may be''' (Articles of Faith, pf 430). According to Brighman Young, "the Lord created you and me for the purpose of becoming Gods like Himself... We are created, we are born...to become Gods like unto our Father in heaven" (Journal of Discourses, Vol.3,pg.93).

Back in the Middle Ages we saw that certain humanistic elements entered the church. The essence of the Reformation was the removal of these from the church's teaching. On the other hand, humanistic thinking developed in the Renaissance and again went further in the Enlightenment. The teachings of the Enlightenment became widespread in the various faculties of the German universities, and theological rationalism became an identifiable entity in the eighteenth century. Then gradually this came to full flood through the German theological faculties during the nineteenth century. Thus, though the Reformation had rid the church of the humanistic elements which had come into it in the Middle Ages, a more total form of humanism entered the Protestant church, and has gradually spread to all the branches of the church, including the Roman Catholic. The concept of man beginning from himself now began to be expressed in theology and in theological language. Or we can say that these theologians accepted the presuppositions of rationalism. As the Renaissance had tried to synthesize Aristotle and Christianity and then Plato and Christianity, these men were attempting to synthesize the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Christianity. This attempt has often been called religious liberalism.

Harry A. Ironside (1876-1951)
A Plymouth Brethren, author and preacher known for his lively style and clear-cut interpretations, was at the center of the fundamentalist network from 1930-1948, when he became the final authority on fundamentalist teaching. Ironside is best known for his prolific literary output and was a major figure in the popularizing of dispensationalism among American evangelicals and for the most part followed the views of the Scofield Reference Bible.

Fundamentalism
Evangelical Protestants rallied around fundamental doctrines of the faith. The issuance of The Fundamentals, a series of books defending traditional Christian teachings gave Evangelicals a new name, Fundamentalists.
Conservative Christians such as dispensationalists and Princeton Calvinists joined forces to counter liberalism's rejection of biblical teaching. Fundamentalists wanted to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and to defend it militantly against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other isms regarded as harmful to American Christianity.
Many enemies of Christianity were identified: Romanism, socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Eddyism, Mormonism, spiritualism, and the like, but above all liberal theology, which rested on a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrine of faith, and German higher criticism and Darwinism, which appeared to undermine the Bible's authority. Almost immediately, the list of enemies became narrower and the fundamentals less comprehensive. Five essential doctrines were regarded as under attack in the church: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, Christ's bodily resurrection, and the historicity of the miracles. These came to be regarded as the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
Until very recently the fundamentalist doctrine of separation from the world was understood to discourage involvement in social and political issues. Under this view "the world" is seen as so utterly corrupt and evil that little can be done to redeem its structures and institutions. Hope is placed instead in the return of Christ, the final judgment, and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

Liberalism
Liberalism also known as modernism was a major shift in theological thinking that occurred in the late nineteenth century. The major distinctive is the desire to adapt religious ideas to modern culture and modes of thinking. The rationalistic theological liberalism of the nineteenth century was embarrassed by and denied the supernatural, but still tried to hold on to the historic Jesus by winnowing out of the New Testament all the supernatural elements. Liberals insist that the world has changed since the time Christianity was founded so that biblical terminology and creeds are incomprehensible to people today. Although most would start from the inherited orthodoxy of Jesus Christ as the revelation of a savior God, they try to rethink and communicate the faith in terms which can be understood today.

Humanist Manifesto 1 (1933)

Malthusianism
Perhaps the most dangerous and influential off-shoots of Progressivism's new humanistic fragmentation was Malthusianism. The followers of Malthus believed that if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be eliminated.
A few believed the solution to that dilemma was political - restrict immigration, centralize planning, reform social welfare, and tighten citizenship requirements. Some others thought the solution was technological - control agricultural production, regulate medical proficiency, and nationalize industrial efficiency. But the vast majority of Mathusians felt that the solution was genetic - restrict or remove "bad racial stocks," discourage charity and benevolence, and "aid the evolutionary ascent of man." Through selective breeding, eugenic repatterning, and craniometric specificity, they hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the stock of the "highest" and "most fit" - or Aryan - race. Through segregation, sterilization, birth control, and abortion, they hoped to winnow the "lower" and "inferior" races out of the population.
These ideas found their way into some of the most significant political and social programs of the twentieth century.
Adolf Hitler adopted the ideas of Malthus in a wholesale fashion in his administration of the Third Reich - his exterminative "final solution," his coercive abortion program in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and his elitist national socialism. He echoed the Malthusian call to "rid the earth of dysgenic peoples by whatever means available so they we may enjoy the prosperity of the Fatherland."
After an all-out lobbying effort by Margaret Sanger's staff, the Committee on Marriage and the Home of the Federal Council of Churches - a precursor to the National Council - became the first major organization in the history of Christendom to affirm the language and philosophy of "choice." Soon after, the Quakers, the Northern Presbyterians, the Congregational church, the Methodist-Episcopal church, and several Baptist denominations followed suit. In Germany, the cooperating church gave silent approval of Hitler's harsh Erbgedsundheitsgetz laws, which prescribed compulsory abortions, sterilizations, and eugenic controls for "dysgenic" peoples throughout occupied Eastern Europe. Finally, even the Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops capitulated to the Malthusian presuppositions.

Disunity, racked the church during much of the twentieth century, not just an institutional and a denominational disunity, but a fundamental disunity of focus and purpose. Beginning in the early 1940's the fundamentalists divided gradually into two camps. There were those who voluntarily continued to use the term to refer to themselves and to equate it with true Bible-believing Christianity. There were others who came to regard the term as undesirable, having connotations of divisive, intolerant, anti-intellectual, unconcerned with social problems, even foolish. This group wished to regain fellowship with the orthodox Protestants and people in the large northern denominations - Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian.
When believers began to abandon orthodoxy in a wholesale fashion, they simply exchanged the Christian system of moral standards that had brought Western culture to full flower for ancient pagan values. When the ethical system of the Bible is jettisoned, men are left to their own devices and thus quickly revert to destructive primal passions. There is no other alternative. There is no third way. There is no middle ground (Matt. 12:30). Working at cross purposes with itself, the church tragically nullified its import and impact at the very time it was most needed. It abdicated its role as the pacesetter of art, music, and ideas, yielding to a new cultural and scientific high priesthood. A rapid slide into neo-paganism resulted.

During the past forty years in North America, American values have dramatically shifted. At one time, our culture was governed by a consensus of Judeo-Christian thought, though even then society was no less sinful at its core. But at least life was regarded as sacred, homes were honored and secure, homosexuality was clearly viewed as wrong, and God and the church were outwardly revered.
Righteous indignation and holy zeal became all but endangered species during much of the century. Passions were turned inward, as were devotions. Virtues became vices, and the most awful of indulgences became canonized orthodoxies. Risk, jeopardy, and self-sacrifice were replaced by security, certainty, and self-gratification. Thus, the only urgency that drove much of the church during this dark period in history was its own satisfaction. An easy "instant-everything" mentality developed so that believers would not have to face up to their responsibilities or live with the consequences of their actions.
For several hundred years, predestination has been the majority while free will remained the minority. In this century, more and more theologians suggested another theory of God's will: God is no longer to be understood as an immutable monarch controlling human history and individual lives, but rather is to be seen as a self-limiting, loving, and suffering father who allows himself to be affected by his creatures (e.g. Hans Kung, T. Chardin, John Cobb, David Griffin, Clark Pinnock).

The next accepted version in the West of life in the area of non-reason was the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today. Young people (and older ones) tried the drug trip and then turned to the Eastern religious trip. Both seek truth inside one's own head and both negate reason.

Hinduism is the religion of the peoples of India. Today, there are almost as many versions of Hinduism as there are villages or groups of Hindus. It is a twisted, confusing religion which strives for ecstatic experiences through severe asceticism and a works oriented salvation.
At the heart of Hinduism is to exalt oneself spiritually while the needs of others are often neglected. The underlying and dominant belief which provides unity is the doctrine of reincarnation: the belief that at death the soul always passes into another body until released from the continuous wheel of rebirth. Reincarnation is little more than a rather clever teaching on salvation by works. The focus is on self, good deeds done in hope of bettering ones Karma or fate in the next life. These reincarnations or life cycles supposedly continue indefinitely until you get it right. When you reach that point, you enter a state of peace and or serenity with the cosmic conscienceness.

In Buddhism there is no god as we conceive of God. The idea of self in Buddhism is distinctive. The self or soul is made up of five elements or skandhas - body, feelings, perception, impulses and consciousness - and it's constantly changing. It is not a 'permanent self' which connects a man's new life to the life of his former existence. Rather it is the deeds or karma which link one existence to another. The goal of human existence is nirvana, the state of bliss arrived at when desire ceases and karma is no more.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person's own head. With Huxley's idea, what began with the existential philosophers - man's individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself - came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one's own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. - Colossians 2:8

They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie. - 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen. - Romans 1:25

Relativism
Totalistic relativism is:
(1) an epistemological theory denying any objective, universally valid human knowledge and affirming that meaning and truth vary from person to person, culture to culture, and time to time;
(2) a metaphysical theory denying any changeless realities such as energy, space, time, natural laws, persons, or God and affirming that all conceivable meaning rests on activities, happenings, events, processes, or relationships, in which observers are changing participants; and
(3) an ethical theory denying any changeless moral principles normative for all people in every situation and so of limited validity.

With the onslaught of relativism (the belief that there is no right or wrong, but all is relative) and an infusion of rationalism (the belief that only that which is capable of being tested and proved is real), we essentially rendered God and His truth useless. At best, God and His Word became irrelevant; at worst, they became a hindrance to "progress."
Since truth is no longer absolute - since we can no longer believe anything - we're told we must now believe everything. Tolerance and acceptance are the watchwords of the day. Every kind of bizarre belief, outlandish claim, aberrant experience is justified and embraced. The only things you won't find tolerated are claims to absolute truth and the exposing of error.
The Humanist Manifesto II declared God to be "harmful." We began to publicly order our lives by nonbiblical, godless, faithless values. In turn, our present secular society evolved.

The Death of God Theology established by nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, flourished in the mid-1960s fueled by the bankruptcy of modern theology and because it was a journalistic phenomenon. The movement gave expression to an idea that had been developing in Western philosophy and theology for some time - the suggestion that the reality of a transcendent God at best could not be known and at worst did not exist at all. English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a prodigious amount of verbiage in his Unpopular Essays trying to prove God never existed, that there isn't a "First Cause," as he states it.
On April 8, 1966, Time devoted its cover story to the question "Is God dead?" By casting doubt on God's existence and preeminence, society was cut loose from scriptural moorings and historic restraints. Thereafter, "each man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6). As we all know, vacuums do not exist in human thought. When one dominant idea begins to fade, another will rush to take its place. Thus, when the theologians surgically removed the belief in God from the minds of the vulnerable, a wide range of New Age propaganda quickly tumbled into that void. As faith in Jesus Christ subsided, astrology, psychic readings, crystal influence, pantheistic theologies, Eastern mysticism, Satan worship and all the nonsense taught by Shirley MacLaine gained influence.

Humanism
Modern Humanism, also called Naturalistic Humanism, Scientific Humanism, Ethical Humanism and Democratic Humanism is defined by one of its leading proponents, Corliss Lamont, as "a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion." Modern Humanism has a dual origin, both secular and religious, and these constitute its sub-categories. Secular Humanism is an outgrowth of 18th century enlightenment rationalism and 19th century freethought. Many secular groups, such as the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism and the American Rationalist Federation, and many otherwise unaffiliated academic philosophers and scientists, advocate this philosophy. Religious Humanism emerged out of Ethical