Deism. D-E-I-S-M. What is it? We live in a world that is, we got a worldly church and a churchy world today. A worldly church and a churchy world. And so many of the people that even go to church do not believe in God or the Bible. I wrote a little book here 50 years ago or so. It's called The Doctrines of the Bible. Donald, I will send one to you pretty soon. I think I already had, I thought. The Doctrines of the Bible by Dr. Jim Phillips. And there is a lesson in their own God. There's a lesson in their own Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. But the world today is very churchy and very religious. But so much of the world does not believe in the God of the Bible. That's the problem. the God of the Bible. Through Satan's influence, there is so much, so many isms and religions out there that are some close to the truth and some far away from the truth. But they're all over, they're conglomerates, they're just a chaos of religious ideas. The Lord called His church out to the seashores of Galilee, and that's one of the last messages I did there. I need to do one upon this rock also, I think. I think that would be good. But the Lord called out His church. And then He gave that church doctrines. The church taught something. In Matthew 28, 18 to 20, it says there in the Greek, it says, after you've gone out, And King James says, Go ye therefore. But it doesn't say that actually. It says, after you've been scattered out. It's a prophecy. The church was scattered. It says, Make disciples. Make, my faith is, habitual learners. And it says, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. teaching them to guard with their lives all things that I've handed down, those things of the doctrines of the Bible, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, the doctrine of baptism, etc., etc., etc. But sometimes it was well received, sometimes it wasn't. There was a combination of Judaism and Christianity, and that was a real problem at first. Then the Jewish people started persecuting the churches. Then the Roman Church, or the Roman Empire, started persecuting Christians, starting with Nero and those back there. He was one of the greatest offenders. The History of the Christian Church by Philip Schaaf, Volume 1 here, page 853 through 886. There's a lot of information that goes on. Faith and Criticism is where it starts out. Parking this down here a little bit, I'll get back to it. But deism, let's look at a term called deism. Deists are those which believe in God. Deist, deist. De comes from Deo in Latin, which means God. Theos is a Greek word, theology. The word theology comes from the Greek. Theology, the study of God. Logos, study, and theos, God. Deists believe in God. but they do not believe in the God of the Bible. That's the problem. It is a position of rationalist theology. I'm reading from my notes. It rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge. That's a real big problem. It rejects revelation as a divine source of knowledge, asserts that the empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusive, logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a supreme being as a creator of the universe. Now, there are many people in America, and the leaders, our former leaders, our founding fathers that were deists, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name just two. It says here that it is a belief in the existence of God, but not the God of the Bible. They believe that God did not reveal anything to us. Now the Muslims, they have the Quran that they said basically Muhammad received and he recited it by memory and people copied it down and there were many different copies of this originally. The Muslims say that that is absolutely the only perfect book, the only perfect revelation of God. But the Bible was written many years before that. It started with the book of Job, was the oldest book in the Bible, and then Moses later on wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And then we have the prophets revealing to us. But if you're a deist, you don't believe any of that. I want you to understand, you don't believe this. Now, they believe that natural theology, that is, God's existence, is revealed through nature only. That's all. Since the 17th century and during the Age of Enlightenment, especially the 18th century, England, France, and North America, various Western philosophers and theologians formulated a critical rejection of several religious texts belonging to many organized religions and began to appeal only to the truth that they felt could be established by reason, an exclusive source of divine knowledge. Such philosophers and theologians were called deists. And the philosophy and theology point to their being. Many laws that we have in the world today, many governments that we have today, If they say they believe in God, they are many times just deist. Basically, a Sadducee is a deist. They don't believe in angels. They don't really believe in a personal God. They're maybe even more further away from the truth than deists are, normal deists. At the end of the 19th century, some of the tenants continued as other intellectual and spiritual beliefs. We have Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science. They are a play to reality and to the Bible also. I have Mary Baker's Eddy over there, key to scriptures. Now in ancient history there were deists. If you really want to get down to it, God in his revelation through, when we studied systematic theology, God makes himself known to man through what? First of all, the intuition in man tells you that there is a God. God draws you to him through this natural, what we might call drawing, this influence in your heart, in your real being. Then He appeals to you through His nature, now Deus believe in that, that through nature God shows you Himself, how beautiful He is, how wonderful He is, and that's true. And then we have God revealing Himself through special revelation which they don't believe, like the prophets, like Moses, Isaiah, the book of Job. the New Testament writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the different revelations that we have through Paul, the apostle. We see these special revelations, and then we see the biblical revelation also. And in this age that we live in today, the church is the administrator of God's kingdom. But there's a lot of churches out there, a lot of churches. Baptists always trace themselves back to the seashores of Galilee. Now, I know some of you Baptists out there believe the church was started on the day of Pentecost. That's not true. That's not when the church was started. The church was started in Galilee. And then we have the Catholicism started in what year? What year did Catholicism start? 325 A.D. That's when Catholicism actually began. And the man that coined that Catholic church was Constantine. the ruler of the Roman Empire, which became the Holy Roman Empire. And they did a few good things besides killing Christians. They did kill Christians. They had the Toleration Act and everything, and you see that on this here in 311 A.D. Constantine came on the scene in 313. Then we have in 325 the Council of Dicea and the co-ordination of the Catholic Church, the Church Universal. The church is not universal. The church is a physical, visible, local body of believers, tied to no other entity but Christ himself. Now, in Islam, a lot of their people believe in deism. in all reality. There are different divinity schools in Islam also, just like there are in Christianity. Islam, the god of Islam is Allah. And their statement of faith is, there is no god but Allah. He has no companion. In other words, he has no son. And Muhammad is his messenger, or apostle. There's all kinds of schisms in that group also. You even have the whirling dervishes. You know, those are Pentecostal Islamic people. They talk in tongues and go into frenzies. You got Catholics that do the same thing. They all have one entity. They are involved with that spiritual influence in the charismatic movement. In the 10th century, The Ash'ari school developed a response to the Mutsali and the theologian Abu al-Hassan al-Ash'ari taught that the use of reason and possibility to deduce moral truths as reasoning, in other words, he was a deist also, his position opposed the Matu In the 10th century Muslim scholar, theologian, Abu Masur al-Mathurata, human reason is a creator deity, solely based on rational thought and independent from divine revelations. We have that. Now we have that in Christendom also. Now Christianity is truth. Christendom is groups that say that they are Christ-Christians. Christendom and Christianity are different. The origins of Deism itself go back to ancient times. It just simply means to believe in God. From the Latin term Deus, Deus, and the Greek form is theos, of course. Deism was generally unknown in the Kingdom of France until the 1690s, when Pierre Bayle published his famous dictionary, Historique Critique, which contains an article on Verret. The English words deist and theist were originally synonymous. In the 17th century, the term started to diverge in meaning. The term deist, with its current idea and mean, first appears in English in Robert Birkin's The Anatomy of Melancholy. The first major statement of deism in England is by Lord Herbert Chervery's book, They Veritate, 16.4. Lord Herbert, like his contemporary Descartes, searched for the foundations of knowledge. He's searching for knowledge. I'm going to tell you something, knowledge is found in the Bible. Now you go out in the front yard out here, Marilyn, when you go out in the front yard or down on the creek or something, you see God, don't you? You see God in His creation. Oh yeah. Herbert's theory of knowledge distinguishes truth and experience and distinguishes reason about an experience and in it and they reveal truths. In our truths are imprinted in our minds, he said, the evidence of their universal acceptance. Herbert referred to universal truths as a Notatre communes, common notes. Herbert believed that there were five common notions that unify all religious beliefs. Now this, I'm going to tell you something, even in error, even in total heresy, there is a little bit of truth. Even in total heresy, there is a little bit of truth. It has to have a little bit of truth in it to be accepted. There is one supreme God, number one, God ought to be worshipped, number two. Virtue and piety are the main parts of divine religion. In other words, you ought to be a good person. We ought to be remorseful for our sins and repent. Divine goodness dispenses rewards and punishments both in this life and after it. He didn't have very many followers, by the way, Herbert didn't. until the 1680s when Herbert found a true successor, Charles Malone, 1654 to 1693. The peak of deism was between 1696 and 1801. John Locke's essay concerning human understanding. You hear these names. These names are important in history. But what did they teach? What did they do? Many times we say they were Christian. No, they were not Christian, they were deist. Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian, he was a deist. Benjamin Franklin was not a Christian, he was a deist. And I'm going to quote him later too. The history of the English deists, Herbert's etymology, the idea of good notions. Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton. Under influence of Newton, they turned to their argument from design as the principal argument for the existence of God. Divine nature, nature in its design, is a premise for the existence of God. Now, atheists are some of the most ignorant people in the world, I think. Because they can't even see the nature and they always say, it just happened. It didn't just happen. Peter Gay identifies John Toland's Christianity as not mysterious, 1696. The Bible says that there are the mysteries, Paul talks about the mysteries of Christ, the mystery of Christ, the mystery of the church. The secrets of God written in the Bible are exposed there. Locke's and John Tolton's Christianity Not Mysterious provoked the beginning of the post-Lockean deism. Among notable figures, Gay describes Toland and Matthew Tyndale as the best known. Gay considered them to be talented publicists rather than philosophers or scholars. He regards Middleton and Anthony Collins as contributing more to the substance of debate in contrast to the fringe writers as Thomas Kachub and Thomas Wollstock. Other prominent deists were William Whittleston, Charles Blount, Henry St. John, Viscount, Bollingbroke, and later Peter Arnett, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Especially noteworthy is Matthew Tyndale's Christianity as Old as a Creation in 1739, which became very soon after his publication the focal center of the deist controversy. Every argument, quotation, and issue raised for decades can be found in the work that is now termed the Deist Bible. The Deist Bible. There may be Deists in your churches out there, people. I know I was a pastor, volunteer preacher, teacher at Valley Baptist Church for 20 years, and some of these people would come in there, they were Deists. They were Deists. Unitarians, and they would try to convert the pastors. They'd give them notes and letters, and this happened. They'd say, Brother Jim, we're going to send this guy to you. See if you can do something with him. Sometimes I'd get them converted, and sometimes I'd run them off. I'd say, why in the world do you go to church if you don't believe anything about it? But there were girls there, you know. The guys liked girls, and so they would go there to see girls. And girls would go there to see guys a lot of times. The meat market, sometimes churches become meat markets. And the theology is secondary to finding a sweetheart or a lover boy. Enlightenment, you remember that term, the enlightenment? The enlightenment in history? In the Enlightenment, deism consisted of two philosophical assertions. Reason, along with features of the natural world, and a valid source of religious knowledge. They look at rocks and trees and stuff to find a religion. And you even look at this in my own culture, Native American culture. They are almost pantheists in some way. But in all these religions, I want you to understand something. There's no hope. There's no hope. There's no hope. When you look at their theology and their deism, pantheism, they just think man is another bug, he's another coyote or whatever. And when you die, you just go back to the dirt. You just go to the dirt. Mother Earth, whatever. I am a writer. I wrote a couple of books on my introduction to the thoughts of the American Indian. And the reason for that was to try to show them that the revelation that they had, what little revelation they had, really come from the God of the Bible. And you can study those cultures, you can study those traditions and everything and see that, but the Bible is the real revelation of God. Leading you back to the real person of God. The Lakota people, the father is Wakan Tanka. The son is Tanka Sheila. The Holy Spirit is Skam Taku Skam Skam. And I try to show them that these are real persons in the Bible. These people really existed, you know. Jesus really did live. He lived upon the earth. He's not a legend. He's not a good prophet. He's a real person. He's God in flesh. No divine revelation outside of nature is what they believe. They believe that God exists and created the universe. God gave mankind and humans the reason to or the ability to reason, and turned them loose. That's it. He just created them and turned them loose. The denial of divine revelation as a valid source of religious knowledge is part of this deism. The rejections of all books, including the Quran and the Bible, that claim to contain divine revelation, we know that the Quran is so. I mean, if you've really studied the Quran, I've read it. I can take it and show you every page in there where I've marked it up and read it. That's not divine revelation. That's a copycat of the Bible. It's a reversion of the Bible. Rejection of the incomprehensible notion that the Trinity and other religious mysteries are nothing but legends, propaganda. The rejection of all reports and miracles and prophecies in the Bible. Now you read the book of Ezekiel and Daniel and Isaiah and I'm going to tell you something, those books were Jeremiah, these were prophets. A prophet does not make mistakes. We have many modern day prophets in the charismatic movement that they prophesy and prophesy and prophesy and prophesy and some of their meetings in some of these hyper-Pentecostal churches are nothing but shouting and Talking in tongues. Now according to the Bible, if those revelations don't come to pass, then you're supposed to kill the prophet. Because he's a false prophet. Not 50% accurate, not 70% accurate, not 95% accurate, but 100% accurate to live. The Julie Green business is going on today. all the prophecies according to religious and even political today. They reject all miracles and all prophecies. The deists say that the origin of all religion goes back to the simple reality that God created the world, that He created man. In almost every prehistoric type religion, down in South America, in Africa, wherever you go, they have religion. But the religion that they have Many times, I'm going to use an example of Sir Jacob Busa. Sir Jacob Busa was a hit, well he was a bounty hunter in the Solomon Islands. Before he knew Christ, he would go and pray to his gods, his demons, and they would give him power, and he would go search down an outlaw, and when he'd catch that outlaw, he would cut out his heart and eat his heart, or his liver, because he was given to him that the outlaws were scared to death of the name Jacob Busa. Jacob Busa, during World War II, worked with Carlson Raiders and other Marines, and they he would go and be a scout for them one time they caught him. In his briefcloth, he had American flag. And so they began to torture him. He was without water for days. They made him drink urine. They made him drink salt water. Tied him to a tree that had ants in it. The ants bit him. They cut him open. But he wouldn't tell anything. They couldn't get him to tell anything about the Americans. barely was alive, so dehydrated. Then they started dragging him on that they were going to attack the American forces, so they started dragging him toward that. And they decided finally they didn't need him anymore because they weren't going to help him, so they run him through with a samurai sword and cut his throat and lacerated him all over and left him for dead. Because he was so dehydrated, he didn't bleed out. He got up and he went behind the, around the Japanese forces and then into the camp. And he wouldn't take any medical treatment until he told them how many forces there were, what kind of weapons they had and all. Within two weeks they had given him 18 or 20 pints of blood. I can't remember how many it was now. You can look it up on the internet. Sir Jacob Busa. When he was with the Solomon Islands, with Carlson's Raiders, there was a man there. Neil Morley was his name, and he was a Christian. Neil Morley was with Carlson Raiders. They went in there 30 days in the islands, and the average one lost 50 to 75 pounds. They were starved to death, but he was leading them. After he was cut all to pieces and everything, he was back out there being a scout within two weeks. Can you imagine that? The Queen of England knighted him, Sir Jacob Vosson. The Marines asked him what he wanted. And he said, I want you to send a missionary to my people to build churches to these islands, and I want you to send some music makers, a band, so they can sing with them. And Neil Morley went there and established, I don't know how many churches, lots of churches. He was one of my personal friends. One time called on Marilyn to pray, and we were up at a church camp up in Hatchbury, California, and he was up there. And Marilyn was, we had just gotten married, Marilyn was a little shy country farm girl that never was out among people at all. She was secluded and basically imprisoned by her family. And she didn't know how to act around people at all and he asked her to pray. And she sat there and it went on for moments and moments and moments and moments. And finally she said, Amen, in Jesus' name. Just like that, that I had to explain to them that you had never prayed in church before anything, even though you were a preacher's wife, that you were learning in the learning process. The different deists sometimes have different ideas. Some believe in the mortality of the soul. And some about the existence of hell and damnation to punish the wicked and existence of heaven to reward the virtuous. Anthony Collins, Bolingbroke, Thomas Shoba, Peter Arnett were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul. Benjamin Franklin believed in reincarnation and resurrection. And here we get back into Native American culture and your Buddhism. Lord Herbert Cherry and William Wollaston held that souls exist survive death and the afterlife are rewarded or punished by God for their behavior in life. Thomas Paine, now we ought to remember that name, Thomas Paine, believed in the probability of the immortality of the soul. They were deists. But they didn't believe the Bible. They didn't believe the Bible. They did not believe the revelation of God to mankind. Miracles and Divine Providence The most natural position of deists is to reject all forms of supernaturalism, including the miracle stories in the Bible. The problem was that the rejection of miracles also seemed to entail the rejection of Divine Providence. That is, God taking a hand in human affairs was the rejection of miracles and something that deists were inclined to accept. Those who believed in the watchmaker God rejected the possibility of miracles and divine providence. They believed that God, after establishing natural laws and setting the cosmos in motion, stepped away. He did not keep tinkering with his creation. The suggestion that he did was insulting to him. Others, however, firmly believed in divine providence, and so were reluctantly forced to accept, or at least possibly, the miracles. God was, after all, all-powerful. He could do whatever he wanted to do. And temporarily suspending his own natural laws, the freedom of necessity. Now, we heard of Sir Isaac Newton. philosophers under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his science tended to view the universe as a vast machine, a clock, a great watch. Now I really like watches. I have. I was an amateur watch fixer one time. I'm not a watchmaker, I was a watch fixer. Here is a Rolex. I've had that Rolex for nearly 30 years. It's a almost bulletproof. They're smooth as glass. And I'll show this to you. I tell you what, they're tough. It takes a tough watch to stay with me. Anyway, I'll get up there real close so you can see it. Very simple Rolex. I found it in a hawk shop and I gave $400 for it. It was, believe it or not, Rolex had put the wrong mainspring in this watch and it wouldn't keep time and the guy that bought it threw it and broke it. And I bought it, I took it to a watchmaker and he worked on it and didn't put Rolex parts in it and it still didn't run right. And I took it to a real good one over there in Salt Lane, California and he repaired it I went to pick it up, he put it on his timing machine, he looked at it, there's something wrong with this watch. He said, I can't give this to you, something's wrong. He put an 18 carat bezel on it, and a crown, and other things for me, and he restored it, but it wasn't keeping time. He went in there and found out the wrong mainframe was put in it from Rolex. So he put the right one in there, and I set it twice a year, when time changes. Otherwise it works. The deists think that the universe is just like a watch. It's very finely tuned and it takes care of itself because of natural tuning of it. This watch here, it says on there, Oyster Perpetual. It winds itself and it's waterproof. And that's why they look at the universe like a Rolex watch that God made and walked off and left it. never needed to oil it again or clean it or whatever. Newtonian science, the view of the universe as a vast machine, a great watch. A creator had set up the motion by a created being and continues to operate according to natural laws without any divine intervention. The view was naturally led in what is called the Necessaritanism of the modern term. determinism, including human behavior, is completely casually determined by antecedent circumstances and natural law. The Consonance dates about freedom versus necessity were regular feature of Enlightenment religions and philosophical discussions reflecting the intellectual climate of the age and of the time that they were in. And there were differences among deists about freedom and determinism. Anthony Collins is one of the Necessitarianism. David Hume was a deist and a philosopher. whether he was an atheist or something else. Like Deist, Hume rejected revelation, divine revelation. His famous essays on miracles provided a powerful argument against belief in miracles. He did not believe that an appeal to reason could provide a justification for religion. his essays on Natural History of Religion of 1757. He contended that polytheism was not monotheism, that first and most ancient religion of mankind, and that psychological basis of religion is not reason but fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown. Most atheists today will say, I'm not afraid of the unknown. I'm not afraid. I don't need God, some big father up there to tell me what to do and what's right and wrong. And this is kind of what he believed. Now in Waring's words, he said, the clear reasonableness of natural religion disappeared before semi-historical look at what can be done about uncivilized man, a barbarous and necessarious animal. Hume termed him as natural religion. When a man worships himself and protects himself above all others. You know, we've had some politicians like that. That dispensed, that didn't dispense in killing people. Murders of some of the presidents of the United States, like LBJ. Probably had at least Mack Wallace, his hitman, he killed from 17 to 19 people, possibly even the President of the United States. Lee Harvey Oswald, Sue Jack Ruby, pulling strings, pulling strings, pulling strings like a mafia. Clinton family, Bush family. Killed and destroyed for their causes, for the betterment of mankind, as they say sometimes, A man is a barbarous animal. And what he practices, he practices to stay in existence. He talked about this fabric of superstition. Firm man was not unspoiled. Philosopher clearly seen the truth of one God, a creator. And the history of religion was not, as deists have implied, retrograde, the widespread phenomena of superstition was caused less by priestly malice than man's unreason and to be confronted in his experience. In other words, mankind is afraid of the unknown world. Before he goes into the great unknown, he has a religious belief that maybe he can make it to Nirvana or to paradise or whatever. Now we come to America. Come to America. America. The 13 colonies of North America from England, they were British subjects, they were influenced and participated into intellectual life in the Kingdom of Great Britain. English deism was an important influence in thinking of Thomas Jefferson. And the principles of religious freedom asserted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. And not only did he do that in the United States Constitution, the preamble to the Constitution, he copied the Native American culture, we the people. We the people is not a British idea, it is a Native American, we the people, we the human beings, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, etc., etc., etc. Not we the king, not the prince, not the president, but we the people. The first amendment to the United States and other founding fathers who influenced various degrees by deism were Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnard, Governor Maurice, Hugh Wilkinson, James Madison, and possibly even Alexander Hamilton. In America, there was a great controversy, of course, over the Founding Fathers, if they were Christians or Deists. Particularly heated was the debate over the belief of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his biography, he said, some books against Deism fell in my hands. These are anti-Deistic books. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures, and it happened that they wrought an effect in me quite contrary to what was intended for them. The arguments of deists which they quoted to be refuted appeared to me much more stronger than their refutations. In short, I became a thorough, absolute deist, like some other deist. Franklin believed that deity sometimes interferes by his particular providence. That's what they call about America. And sets aside the events which otherwise would have been produced by the course of nature and by the free agency of man. And at the Constitutional Convention stated that the longer I live the more convinced proof I see that this truth that God governs in affairs of mankind. Of course, Romans tells us that, doesn't it? Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest founding fathers that we have, explicitly and plainly believed in his deistic principles. He referred to himself as a Unitarian rather than a Deist. Now, what is a Unitarian? A Unitarian believed that God created That there's no mankind, there's good and every mankind, there's no man that basically is going to go to hell, that we're all going to go to paradise. He says that the canonical Gospels, known as the Jefferson Bible, strip all of the Bible of any supernatural or dogmatic references from the narrative of Jesus' life. Like Franklin Jefferson believed in a God's continuing activity in human affairs. He believed that God constantly intervened with human affairs but he did it through reason and he didn't do it through miracles and he didn't do it but through divine revelation. Thomas Paine is greatly noteworthy in contributions to the cause of the American Revolution and for his writings in defense of deism. alongside his criticism of Abrahamic religions. The Age of Reason, 1793-1794. Other writings he advocated deism and promoted reason and free thought and argued against institutional religions as a general of the Christian doctrine in particular. The Age of Reason was short, readable, and probably the only deist treatise that continues to be read and influential in people and mankind today. Another contributor was Elihu Palmer, 1674-1806, The Bible of American Deism, The Principles of Nature. He attempted to bring some organization to Deism by founding the Deistic Society of New York. and other deistic societies from Maine to Georgia. In France, it was Voltaire. Also Maximilian Rodespierre and Rousseau. During the French Revelation of 1789 to 1799, the deistic cult of the Supreme Being and direct expression of Rodespierre's theological views was established Briefly, just under three months as the new state religion of France. It wasn't originally about the Bible and God, it was originally deism. That's what we call the bloody revolution, remember. Replacing the disposed Catholic Church and the rival atheistic cult of reason. There were over 500 French revolutionaries who were deists. They believed in miracles and often prayed to God. In fact, over 70 of them thought that God miraculously helped the French Revolution win victories over their enemies. Furthermore, over 100 French Revolutionary Deists also wrote prayers and hymns to God. Citizen Devalais was one of the many French Revolutionary Deists. Seventh Heaven, with Jimmy Stewart in that movie. He was a deist in that movie, but he didn't believe in God. He became an atheist, he said. These deists believed that God did miracles. De Valais said, God who conducts our destiny, designed to concern himself with our dangers, he commanded the spirit of victory to direct the hand of faithful French And in a few hours, aristocrats received the attack which were prepared and the wicked ones were destroyed and liberty was avenged. Deism in Germany. I'm going to have to make more than one message on deism. We're going to get to that in a little while. Deism in Germany is not well documented. We only know from correspondence with Voltaire and Frederick the Great was a deist. Immanuel Kant's identification with deism is also controversial. Peter Gay describes the Enlightenment deism as the entering slow decline and recognizable movement in the 1730s. The increasing influence of naturalism and materialism. The writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Raising questions about the ability of reason to address metaphysical questions, the violence of the French Revolution, Christian revivalist movements such as Pietism and Methodism, which emphasize personal relationship with God along the rise of anti-rationalism and counter-enlightenment philosophies such as the Johann Georg Hammann, or the theism has declined in popularity over time, scholars believe that these ideas still have lingering influence on modern religion and society. Absolutely it does, through theitarianism. One of the major activities of the deist, biblical criticism, involved its own highly technical discipline, deist rejection of revealed religion, involved in the in contributing to the 19th century liberal British society and the rise of Unitarianism. I'm going to end this section, lesson number one, and this is in church history, by the way, stating that if you don't have Jesus Christ, as God in flesh, you don't have religion at all. All you have is superstition. And without the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you have no hope for eternal life. You have no hope that your triune being, your body, soul, and spirit will be reunited again after death and be with God forevermore. Without Jesus Christ as a miracle working God, you have no hope. Without the death, the burial, and resurrection of that God in flesh, you have no hope. But yet we have a religious mongrel religion over America today. Wouldn't it be nice if all your friends, all your loved ones, were under the same umbrella of Jesus Christ and His blood? Yet many are religious, but they don't know God. Many are religious, but they don't know Jesus. Many are religious, but they aren't saved. Our Father, we send this message out for you. Please use it wherever it goes to enlighten people, to teach them that religion is not enough. Belief in God is not enough. It takes a real personal relationship with our Savior and our God through His blood on the cross of Calvary lead you to eternal life and to truth through your word. In Jesus' name, amen.