Friday, January 21, 2011

Primary Source From Elihu Palmer on Deism



A taste:






nadezhda said...

Very interesting passage from Palmer. I'm not sure how helpful "strict Deists" is, however, since Deists tended to be pretty anti-creedal and eclecticism was a feature, not a bug.

That's one of the reasons the various English Deist writers (1st 3rd of 18thC) who tried to define "Deism" didn't have lots of "followers" per se. Lots of people in England accepted the critique of Christianity by "rationalistic theists" (my preferred term) along the lines of Palmer's statement and then picked through various organized (mostly Christian) religions to find things they could accept or adopt with a bit of modification. They didn't totally reject the notion that Christianity or other religions had never articulated some eternal truths.

But since anything that smacked of open heterodoxy was a career-limiting gesture, most of that thinking was done only in the privacy of one's own library or in conversations or correspondence among reliable friends.

That being said, why do you think Jefferson wouldn't come awfully close to Palmer's description?

Jonathan Rowe said...

Well I don't think Jefferson rejected anything listed above; but there are at least three complications with Jefferson as I see it (there are probably a few more; but these are the three that come to mind as I type this):

1. He unquestionably believed in an active personal God; whether that is consistent with "Deism" is debatable.

2. He called himself a "Christian" and believed his system (that admiddetly rejected EVERY single tenet of orthodoxy, and vast amounts of the Bible as divinely inspired) pure, primitive, real "Christianity."

And 3. He thought of Jesus, arguably, higher than did the Deists. I think he believed Jesus not only greatest moral teacher, but whose perfect moral example "saved" man. Hence arguably Jefferson believed Jesus as a savior.

Tom Van Dyke said...

I think Jefferson referred to our "Savior" several times in his public proclamations---following prevailing custom, as a term for Jesus---but nothing comes to mind where Jefferson acknowledges that Jesus was any more an authority on theology than Jefferson considered himself.


Jefferson's ego took second seat to no man, not even Jesus, whom Jefferson clearly considered no more than a man. An equal.