Deism was the ideology that fused Enlightenment thinking with religious doctrine. During the late 18th century and early 19th century, Deists fought the Puritan and Anglican way of thinking about the Bible and religion. Lambert associates and categorizes the Anglicans and Puritans with the “old learning” and “new learning” with Deists. Each was a worldview at odds with one another. Old learning asserts that the Bible is absolute truth and only people with God-given gift of interpretation could know or teach its truth. Church and state in the old learning society were bedfellows, resulting in persecution of dissenting religions and intolerance. New learning arrived on the scene during this time in America inspired and found on reason, deductive logic, and natural laws from Locke, Bacon, and Newton. New learning empowered the individual to experience God not through the clergy but through personal understanding. This idea broke the power relationship of the church and state. This idea is emphasized in the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom and the First Amendment.
Jefferson constructed his view of Jesus through deism and enlightenment thinking. The deist belief that God is the ultimate architect who created the world and mankind but does not intervene in the world is seen in Jefferson’s omission of supernatural events. Jefferson’s Bible excludes miracles, virgin birth, and resurrection. Jefferson like the “new learners” trusted that the cosmos could be explained by natural law, so miracles are unbelievable because they cannot be explained by science. This is why Jefferson truncated them from his retelling of the gospels in search for not the historical Jesus but the intelligent Jesus, who is the greatest moral philosopher. The deist belief in no trinity along with right behavior is necessary for salvation is evident in Jefferson’s account with the absence of God’s conversations with Jesus like after baptism. The story does not mention how God is pleased with Jesus and loves him because a deist would not see the father-son relationship as important. Jesus is not divine or the son of God just a teacher with a great set of moral instruction. It is no wonder Jefferson keep the Sermon on the Mount because Jefferson’s worldview permits it because the path to true religion is not revelation but reason and moral truth. Jefferson’s Bible represents how one individual equipped with his own worldview and ideology interpreted the Scriptures resulting in a Jesus shaped in Jefferson’s own image.
Jefferson constructed his view of Jesus through deism and enlightenment thinking. The deist belief that God is the ultimate architect who created the world and mankind but does not intervene in the world is seen in Jefferson’s omission of supernatural events. Jefferson’s Bible excludes miracles, virgin birth, and resurrection. Jefferson like the “new learners” trusted that the cosmos could be explained by natural law, so miracles are unbelievable because they cannot be explained by science. This is why Jefferson truncated them from his retelling of the gospels in search for not the historical Jesus but the intelligent Jesus, who is the greatest moral philosopher. The deist belief in no trinity along with right behavior is necessary for salvation is evident in Jefferson’s account with the absence of God’s conversations with Jesus like after baptism. The story does not mention how God is pleased with Jesus and loves him because a deist would not see the father-son relationship as important. Jesus is not divine or the son of God just a teacher with a great set of moral instruction. It is no wonder Jefferson keep the Sermon on the Mount because Jefferson’s worldview permits it because the path to true religion is not revelation but reason and moral truth. Jefferson’s Bible represents how one individual equipped with his own worldview and ideology interpreted the Scriptures resulting in a Jesus shaped in Jefferson’s own image.
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