The God Who Arrives Unbidden

In the spring of 1768, Voltaire famously remarked in his work the Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him (Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer). Among those so inclined, this line is often quoted as one of the first modern confessions of atheism. However, given the zeitgeist of the eighteenth century, perhaps it is better read as a confession of anxiety about the existence of God. It has been noted by many subsequent writers, that the god which the Enlightenment commonly denied was a strawman, an invented creature used to be knocked down and abused for the self-congratulatory purposes of the age, which saw itself as the pinnacle of human knowledge. This god was something cooler, safer, more decorous: the distant and detached architect, the celestial watchmaker so commonly spoken of in the doxology of that century, what has come down to us, and informed our own age, as Deism.

A Domesticated God

Deism, as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has several different famous exponents: Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and in a more statesmanlike key Thomas Jefferson, most of whom proposed a religion of pure reason. In their vision, God created the world, endowed it with its natural laws, and permanently stepped back from his creation. Ergo, the Christian proposition of revelatory knowledge is unnecessary. Theology can only be naturalist and empirical. This takes the Aristotelian revolution of the thirteenth century a step further. It rejects those things categorized as divine revelation and places them in the same category as superstition. Miracles are supernatural, and therefore entirely suspect. The idea of sacramental mystery is an intellectual embarrassment, as science can explain every facet of the natural world. Religion is relegated to the discipline of social ethics, with some vague sense of cosmology thrown in for good measure.

While deism is not atheism, it is something more insidious. It is religion without the intrusion of belief. The Deist’s deity is not quite the deus absconditus of old, the hidden God whose purposes remain mysterious. Their deity is one who is principally absent from the course of human history. This is framed and commonly understood as a function of the world of the Enlightenment, its basic premise is only in early modern drag. This idea is an ancient one that extends far beyond the world of Spinoza and his contemporaries. In the classical world, this idea is commonly attributed to Epicurus, as well as partially to Aristotle in his ‘unmoved mover’ hypothesis. The Deist does not deny the idea of God. He domesticates him to his own liking. The proposition of Deism offers the modern analog to its ancient peers. The god of Deism is infinitely and cosmologically competent, but existentially irrelevant. Detached from the affairs of the material world, he guarantees the moral and natural order of the universe, but never disrupts it. He establishes the groundwork for the physical law of the world, but never forgives sinners in ways that overturn it. Voltaire himself speaks to this moral ambiguity when he says “The theist does not know how God punishes, how He rewards, how He pardons…”

An Unproblematic God

Deism did not arise in a vacuum, and the appeal can clearly be seen in an age bruised by a revolving door of sectarian violence. After the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and the English Civil War, Western Europe longed for a detached deity, a God who belonged to no creed or confession, whose acolytes would not set villages ablaze in their sectarian violence. Deism offered a god stripped of any and all controversy. The numinous God of Christian revelation was exchanged for the more prosaic legislator of nature. It extracted from Christianity its ethical monotheism and left behind the husk of an allegedly irrational faith, devoid of any potential intellectual scandals, or the proposition of a supernatural happening. The result was a creed fit for the rational and urbane gentlemen of the age. Something that could be employed as a class marker with no shortage of braggadocio in tote. Voltaire spoke to this in his usual medium, condescension, claiming “a parish catechist tells children that there is a God, but Newton proves it to the wise.”

However, a god made suitable for the “wise” is also one that is discernible and predictable. The very reasonability of this kind of argument reveals its own fragile spiritual genealogy. Likewise, the Deist’s god is fundamentally a material legislator. Creation becomes a code to be deciphered; morality, obedience to the rational structure discovered within it. Salvation, if the word may be accurately used at all in the case of the Deists, is at best ambiguous.

Perhaps this is found in the paradigmatic example of the so-called Jefferson Bible, the deconstruction of the Gospel account, the life and moral teachings of Christ, into a safe materialist package. In his work, Thomas Jefferson cut out miracles from the Gospels, preserving ethical teachings while excising anything acausal or miraculous. It would be too simple to blame the ideas of Deism on a type of intellectual cowardice or moral ambivalence. However, this too would be a strawman, not addressing the heart, or even the context, for Deism’s emotional latency. At its height in the eighteenth century, many Deists were sincere seekers of the presence of God. They were fundamentally reformers who sought as their primary directive to rescue religious belief from medieval superstition, and to ground morality in universality rather than sectarian thought. That aspiration, particularly with the intellectual drive towards natural law and the transcendent, is noble. However, the pattern of transmutation remains. If faith becomes indistinguishable from decorum, if God becomes indistinguishable from the idea of natural law, as a rule, religion will be translated into being exclusively a social convention, or an ornament for social respectability.

An Absent God

The unfortunate moral irony is that Deism, designed to stabilize and rationalize faith, has often paved the road to unbelief. A distant, uninterested god can be easily dismissed. Once the supernatural is removed from our world, and miracles are declared impossible, then we have an exclusively naturalist outlook wherein there is no space for the God of history. Revelation becomes unnecessary, and all mystery becomes relegated to the realm of the irrational. The subsequent generations following the Enlightenment, posited the obvious question to this: ‘why do we need God at all then?’ The Watchmaker can be replaced by blind mechanism, the Legislator by evolutionary chance. What began as refined theological reform slid, rather quickly, into a practical social atheism. In this sense, Deism served a halfway house in Western thought. Too rational for revivalists, too theological for materialists. It satisfied a distinctive elite conscience in the eighteenth century, but it could not sustain a living piety for very long. Piety is the sine qua non of encounter. It demands a God who not only establishes the natural order of the universe, but also disrupts it.

The historical scandal of Christianity is not that God exists, but that he acts in the course of history—strangely, perversely through the unpredictable instrument of grace. The proposition of Christianity rests upon a considerably more academically dangerous idea that God refuses to remain in his proper place. He subtly operates through the world that he fashioned, overturning the seemingly inevitable trajectory of the material world. A god safely confined to the heavens bothers no one, upsets no one with his psychological distance. This position may satisfy the philosopher and the statesmen, but such a god could never be encountered.

An Unbidden God

The whole of Christianity and the phenomenon of the incarnation rests upon the proposition that God refuses this distance, to the extent of becoming part of the tangible, material world. He enters history, disrupts the apparent depraved inevitabilities of civilization, and makes demands upon the human race.

And therein lies the enduring offense of Christianity: it does not permit God to remain a mechanical abstraction. It insists on a God who is inconveniently present. The god of Deism waits politely behind the machinery of the natural world, summoned when teleological explanation or morality requires him. The Christian God arrives unbidden. The sixteenth century Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus captured the distinction which might stand to answer Voltaire: Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus, Deus Aderit (invoked or uninvoked, God is present).