“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”[1] This is how one of the most famous leaders of the American Revolution and an influential political writer of the late 18th century—Thomas Paine (1737-1809)—begins his testimony of faith. A few lines later in the same book, The Age of Reason, after vehemently rejecting the creed of all monotheistic religions, Paine emphatically declares, “My own mind is my church.”[2]
Paine and the Age of Reason
Thomas Paine was born into a religious family—his father was a Quaker and his mother an Anglican. He left Britain for the New World in 1774, disillusioned by the oppression of the lower classes.[3] He had already renounced his family’s religious beliefs and embraced Deism, a philosophy that holds that there is an infinite, all-powerful, benevolent God who reveals Himself through nature. In this view, humans, endowed with reason, can only understand Him by analysing creation. The British colonies across the Atlantic, or the New World, were fertile ground for Deism at the time, as the struggle for freedom of thought, as well as economic, social, and political liberty—together with a firm belief in the progress of science—were part of the Deist ethos.
In 1776, Paine published Common Sense, the 50-page work that became the most famous argument for American independence. Printed in nearly half a million copies, this pamphlet established Thomas Paine as the most famous publicist and polemicist of his time.[4]
Several years later, Paine travelled to Europe, where he wrote The Age of Reason during the French Revolution. After 15 years in Europe, he was invited to return to America by Thomas Jefferson, the newly elected President of the United States. The last almost seven years of his life, spent in the country of which he was a fervent supporter, were marked by his efforts to promote Deism, but also by the controversies provoked by The Age of Reason in particular.
Jesus, the man facing the Goddess of Reason
During his stay in Paris, observing the involvement of the clergy in political machinations, the control of the Roman Catholic Church over the people, and the strong anti-religious reaction of the revolutionaries, Paine decided that “at one stroke he might save the true religion, Deism, from atheism and republicanism from despotism.”[5] His stroke was the book The Age of Reason. Addressing the common people and writing in accessible language, Paine attacked Christianity head-on and sought to undermine the authority of divine revelation.
In a general sense, revelation and inspiration refer to the communication of divine messages. Paine admitted that God could communicate in this way, but he considered revelation to be valid only for the person who received it directly. He considered any further transmission to be a rumour that should not be believed.[6] On the basis of this view, Paine rejected the practical possibility of revelation, miracles, and Jesus as Saviour, and thus rejected the entire Christian system.
For Paine, authentic theology was natural theology, and creation was the supreme word of God. He believed that reason was the only way by which mankind could know the divine, and human reason became both the locus of revelation and the criterion for validating truth. Jesus Christ was nothing more than “a virtuous and an amiable man” whose morality remained superior to that of any other system.[7] Although he accepted the existence of the man Jesus, for Paine the history of the New Testament did not reflect reality because it was not written by Jesus but by people who claimed to have known Him. Read in a revolutionary key, Jesus—who preached “most excellent morality and the equality of man”—strongly criticised “the corruption and avarice of the Jewish priests”, attracting their hatred as well as that of the Roman government; caught between the two, “this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.”[8]
Paine did not believe that Jesus was miraculously incarnated, resurrected, or ascended into heaven: “The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it.”[9] Influenced by his experiences in France, Paine considered all the supernatural aspects of Jesus’s life to be myths created later by Christians to gain influence, power, and control over others, a “system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears.”[10] What is more, for Paine, “Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.”[11]
With this premise, Paine argued that the idea of Jesus Christ’s substitutionary death for all mankind was based on pecuniary, not moral, justice. Under pecuniary justice, someone else could pay for one’s debts, but under moral justice, an innocent person could not receive the punishment of the guilty. In his view, Christians had invented the idea of pecuniary justice so that salvation could be monetised, for example in the form of indulgences, and the Church could profit from it. By contrast, Paine argues, “man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker he ever did stand since man existed.”[12] If Adam existed, he was a Deist, since this was the true original religion, distorted by later polytheistic or monotheistic systems.
Consequently, for Paine, sin—in the biblical sense of separation from God leading to a depraved nature and sinful acts—did not exist. The devil was merely a figment of the same Christian conspiracy against the common people. And this religious system, which had led to an “adulterous connection of Church and State,” needed a revolution to enable people to return to a “pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.”[13]
Freedom from the trap of modern Deism
Thomas Paine rebelled against the religious system of his time with the publication of The Age of Reason. Although his critical tone and trenchant approach might suggest otherwise, he was not an atheist. His religion deified action as the only means of access to divine revelation, and he valued the study of science as the only valuable education. His belief in an absolute being has brought him closer to many people in the 21st century. The seductive power of scientific progress, but also the extremism and violence generated by individuals and groups who invoke the validity of their religion to persecute others, seem to justify the embrace of Deism and the rejection of organised religion. Yes, religious violence must be condemned today, as Paine condemned it, and useful technological progress must be encouraged. Nevertheless, Paine’s conflation of his contemporary Christianity with biblical Christianity, and his caricature and criticism of the latter, are not justified.
After reading Paine’s objections, the reader is left with the impression that he was attacking a “straw man”—a distortion of Christianity. Ignoring the presence of revivalist currents within Christianity, such as Methodism, which sought to restore biblical principles to Christianity, Paine chose to label Christianity, in a hasty generalisation, as a “pious fraud.”[14]
As in the contemporary context, Paine chose to deify nature and ignore the presence of natural evil, which, together with the perceived moral evil he strongly criticised, presupposes the need for a solution beyond the human sphere. The Bible presents Jesus Christ, the divine-human being, as the solution to the problem of evil.
Paine did not accept the authenticity and veracity of the Gospels because they did not accord with his rational perception. But to question the honesty of the writers simply because they presented things he could not believe is rather an attack on the person, prompted by a lack of solid argument. It seems that the author of The Age of Reason chose to reject genuine reason and, irritated by the influence of the Bible and the Testament (as he called the Old and New Testaments), called them “stupid texts”[15] whose writers were not the apostles but evil-minded individuals writing a few centuries after the death of Jesus.
There are still people today who, like Paine, accept that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but that He was not divine. Although he claimed that the existence of such a Person and His crucifixion were “within the limits of probability,”[16] Paine referenced the moral character of Jesus’s teachings, which he accepted, while he considered the book in which these teachings were presented to be false. This inconsistency reveals, on the one hand, a certain respect that Paine had for Jesus.
On the other hand, accepting only some of His teachings and rejecting others according to one’s personal rational filter leads to the creation of a Christ in the image of the Goddess of Reason, different from the Christ of the Gospels. And why accept Him only as a teacher when He asserts that He is more than that? As C.S. Lewis says, “a man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher”; he would be either a madman, a diabolical deceiver, or exactly who he said he was.[17] To accept Jesus as God, the contemporary Deist would have to renounce the idolatry of the Goddess of Reason and admit that her snares are poisoned with atheism. Only then can he recognise his Creator in the man Jesus.
Adrian Petre is convinced that Jesus Christ is the Creator of the world, and the path to knowing Him passes through accepting the divine authority of Scripture, not through the deification of reason and science.
