How People Dealt With Faith From the Early Church Through the Enlightenment

            Throughout the history of Christianity, there is a discernable evolution of the idea of faith.  For instance, the Early Church dealt with faith in a different manner than the Medieval Church, as did the Medieval Church from the Church during the Reformation, and so on through the Enlightenment until today.  In this post, special attention is given to the Early Church, the Medieval Church, the time of the Reformation, and the Enlightenment.  All of these held different views of faith. 

            To start off with, what did the Early Church do with the idea of faith?  The Early Church period was a tumultuous time for young Christendom.  Though Christians of this period lived the closest to the apostles and Christ, knowing solid doctrines was hard, because the Scriptures were not circulated well and there was no set canon until the fourth century.  Because of this lack of a foundation, the Early Church focused on making faith normative.  Normative in the sense that the church fathers solidified doctrine. 

            In the Early Church one easily finds debates between Christian leaders as to which doctrines are sound.  An example of this is Ignatius' attack on Docetism which held that Jesus Christ was fully divine, but only appeared to be human.  Also within the Early Church, leaders created creeds that expressed basic and essential orthodox doctrines within Christianity.  The Apostle's Creed and Chalcedonian Creed are examples of this.

            During the Early Church, the church fathers wrote vast amounts of letters and books explaining the Christian faith.  This included men like Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, and Gregory the Great.  The works of both Tertullian and Augustine still impact today's theology.  Among these works are Augustine's Confessions and On the Trinity. 

            Towards the middle of the sixth century, a shift occurred in how people viewed faith.  In the Medieval Church, Christianity conceived two great theologians and philosophers: Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274).  At this time, people began to view faith as something that needed to be reasonable.  Both Anselm and Aquinas were determined to make faith reasonable.  Aquinas believed that reason, apart from faith, could lead one to grasp spiritual truths like the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ. 

            Through efforts of Anselm and Aquinas, Scholasticism reached its zenith in the High Middle Ages.  Scholasticism was the idea of reconciling faith and reason.  The Scholastic method included asking a question, discussing all the sides of arguments about the subject, and then arriving at a conclusion based upon reason.  Through Scholastic methods, Aquinas and Anselm both made proofs of the existence of God.  This was the method through which the Medieval Church made faith reasonable. 

            In the sixteenth century, the idea of faith transformed yet again.  At this time, the Protestant Reformation began.  Before the Reformation, people relied heavily upon educated theologians to provide them with information about how to live.  Because the printing press was not invented yet, Bibles were in great demand.   Most of the Bibles were owned by either monasteries or leaders of churches who could use them to teach others.  The everyday layman did not usually have a chance to own a copy of his own to study. 

            With the Reformation came the push of making faith personal.  Martin Luther led this by translating the Bible into the vernacular of the Germans.  Translating the Scriptures into the vernacular of the day opened up many doors for faith to become personal, because more and more people were able to dig into the Scriptures themselves.  The Reformation pushed faith into the realm of the individual where people could ask what faith really means and develop a relationship with God themselves instead of needing a priest to teach them. 

            As the Medieval Church strived in making faith reasonable, the Enlightenment period (c. 1700-1800) made faith bound to reason.  During the Enlightenment, unaided human reason became the judge of truth.  Two different groups appeared out of this time period: the Rationalists, and the Empiricists.

             Rationalists believed that human reason was the source of finding truth, because sense experiences are erroneous.  Empiricists believed that only sense experiences provided truth, because brains only image that which is sensed.  Both of these groups took faith and ultimately threw it out the door, because neither group could prove knowledge from faith through their epistemologies.  Reason became the norm, where faith and metaphysics could not be considered knowledge.  Knowledge could only come from reason unaided by faith.  Man became the ultimate judge of truth rather than God. 

            Moving through the periods of Christianity until the nineteenth century, one finds a discernable transition among the different eras and how each one dealt with faith.  Each period came as a response to earlier periods.  Every new theology came as a response to earlier theologies.  In the big picture, one finds the truth of God (from the Early Church) replaced with the truth of man discovered by his "omnipotent" reason (from the Enlightenment). Knowing these transitions makes it easier to see where theologies of today come from.