Divine Principle - 5) The Period of Preparation for the Second Advent - 2

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Section 2. The Period of Religious and Ideological Conflicts (1648-1789)

The period of religious and ideological conflicts refers to the 140 years beginning with the secure establishment of Protestantism at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. As modern people continued to pursue the internal and external desires flowing from their original nature, they could not avoid divisions in theology and disputes among philosophies which arose as they exercised freedom of faith and thought.

As previously discussed, God has worked His providence of restoration throughout the course of history by repeatedly separating those representing Abel from those representing Cain, from the individual level to the world level. In the Last Days, this fallen world is divided into the Cain-type communist world and the Abel-type democratic world. Just as the foundation of substance could have been laid in Adam’s family had Cain submitted to Abel and obeyed him, in the Last Days the Cain-type world is to submit to the Abel-type world to establish the worldwide foundation of substance. This is necessary before we can receive Christ at the Second Advent and realize the unified world. For this to happen, the two views of life which would later mature into these two worlds had to be developed in this period.

2.1 The Cain-Type View of Life

The pursuit of the external aspects of the original nature first aroused a movement to revive the ancient heritage of Hellenism and gave birth to the humanism of the Renaissance. Renaissance humanism opposed medieval culture by elevating the dignity of human beings and the value of the natural world over devotion to God and religious dedication. The medieval mind had prized obedience to God while belittling the natural world and regarding the human body as base and even sinful. The Renaissance established a new perspective on life, one which exalted the value of human beings and nature and sought to understand them through reason and experience, logic and experiment. Spurred by the progress of natural science, this view of life gave rise to two major schools of modern philosophy: rationalism, based on the deductive method and empiricism, based on the inductive method.

Rationalism, founded by the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), maintained that the investigation of truth can be founded only on man’s innate reason. After doubting every truth received from history and tradition, Descartes was left with only his reason, as expressed in the proposition, “I think; therefore, I am.” From this first principle, he used the deductive method to affirm knowledge about the external world. Although Descartes accepted and even tried to prove the existence of God based on reason, later rationalists ended up doubting or even denying God’s existence.

The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) founded empiricism, which held that truth can be investigated only through one’s experience. This school asserted that the human mind is like a blank sheet of paper (tabula rasa). It held that to attain new knowledge, one must erase all prejudices and try to comprehend the truth through experience and observation of the external world. Rationalism, which valued human reason while turning away from God, and empiricism, which prized human experience and experimental science, both did away with mysticism and superstition. Whether by using reason or empirical observation to guide human life, they both tended to divorce human beings and the natural world from God.

The Renaissance launched these two currents of thought, which were rooted in humanism. Instead of facilitating the internal inclination to seek God, it gave birth to a view of life which encouraged people to follow only external pursuits. This blocked their path to God and led them toward Satan’s realm. For this reason, it is called the Cain-type view of life. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Cain-type view of life had broken down the verities enshrined by history and tradition. All matters in human life came to be judged by reason or empirical observation. Anything deemed irrational or other-worldly, including belief in the God of the Bible, was thoroughly discredited. People’s energies were narrowly directed toward the practical life. Such was the ideology of the Enlightenment, which developed out of the two trends of empiricism and rationalism. The Enlightenment was the driving force behind the French Revolution.

Representative of this Cain-type view of life was deism, founded by the English philosopher Edward Herbert (1583-1648). Deism propounded a theology rooted entirely in human reason. 

Deists rejected the notion that there could be any harmony between revelation and reason, a traditional view held since the time of Thomas Aquinas. They limited God to a Creator who set the universe in motion and left it to run of its own accord according to the laws of nature which He had set up. They denied that people had any need of divine revelation or miracles. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) made a comprehensive synthesis of eighteenth-century idealism. However, many of the followers of Hegel were influenced by the atheism and materialism of the French Enlightenment and propounded the school of left-wing Hegelianism, which turned the logic of Hegel’s dialectic on its head. D.F. Strauss (1808-1874), a left-Hegelian, wrote The Life of Jesus, which denied the Bible’s accounts of Jesus’ miracles as fabrications by his credulous followers. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) argued in The Essence of Christianity that God was nothing other than the projection of people’s inward psychological nature. Their arguments became foundational for modern atheism and materialism.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) systematized the logic of the left-wing Hegelians as dialectical materialism. They were influenced by Strauss and Feuerbach and also by French socialism. They combined dialectical materialism with atheism and socialism to create the ideology of communism. In this way, the Cain-type view of life, which budded after the Renaissance and grew through the Enlightenment into atheism and materialism, matured into the godless ideology of Marxism, which became the cornerstone of the communist world of today.

2.2 The Abel-Type View of Life

Some people regard the progress of history from the medieval to the modern world as a process which has alienated people from God and religion. This is because they view history according to the Cain-type view of life. The original nature, however, not only pursues external values; it also seeks internal values. As medieval people were prompted by their original nature to pursue internal values, a movement arose to revive Hebraism which bore fruit in the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation spawned philosophies and religious teachings which developed a multi-dimensional view of life seeking to realize the God-given, original nature of human beings. We call this the Abel-type view of life. Even as the Cain-type view of life led away from God and faith, the Abel-type view of life guided modern people to seek God in a deeper and more thoughtful way.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) analyzed philosophically the internal and external pursuits of the original nature, thus pioneering the Abel-type view of life in the philosophical sphere. In his Critical Philosophy, he assimilated the conflicting theories of empiricism and rationalism. According to Kant, our various sensations occur by contact with external objects. These alone may give us the contents of cognition but cannot actualize the cognition itself. To have full cognition, one must possess certain forms of intuition and thought (which are a priori and transcendental) with which to unify the various contents (which are a posteriori and experiential) through a synthetic judgment. These forms of intuition and thought are the very subjectivity of the self.

Therefore, cognition is actualized when the various sensations coming from external objects are integrated and unified with one’s subjective forms by the spontaneous action of thinking and understanding. Thus, Kant overturned empiricism, which held that cognition is determined by external objects, and established a new theory that cognition is governed by the subjective mind.

Kant’s philosophy was succeeded by a number of idealist philosophers: Johann G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) and G.W. F. Hegel. Hegel, in particular, pioneered a new philosophy based on the Hegelian dialectic. Their idealism solidified the Abel-type view of life in the field of philosophy.

In the religious sphere, new movements emerged which opposed the prevailing influence of rationalism in religion and stressed the importance of religious zeal and the inner life. They valued mystical experience over doctrines and rituals.

For example, Pietism appeared in Germany under the leadership of Philip Spener (1635-1705). This movement had a strong conservative bent and adhered to the traditional faith while simultaneously emphasizing mystical experience. Pietism spread to England and flourished among the faithful there, giving rise to new church movements including Methodism, founded by the Wesley brothers (John, 1703-1791, and Charles, 1707-1788). Their work brought about a great revival in England, which had been in a state of spiritual stagnation.

George Fox (1624-1691), the English mystic who founded the Quakers, asserted that Christ is the inner light which illuminates the souls of believers. He insisted that unless one first receives the Holy Spirit, joins in mystical union with Jesus and experiences Christ’s inner light, he cannot understand the true meaning of the Bible. The Quakers endured severe persecution in England but eventually prospered in America.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a renowned scientist whose spiritual senses were awakened; he began a systematic investigation of the spirit world and discovered many of its secrets. Although his research was long ignored by theologians, recently, as increasing numbers of people have communicated with the spirit world, its value is gradually being recognized. In these diverse ways, the Abel-type view of life was maturing to form the democratic world of today.