Did the Reformation Lead to Atheism?

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

I recently watched a video where Dr. Michael Horton responded to Tom Holland’s claim on a The Rest is History episode that the Reformation contributed to the rise of Atheism in Europe.

Here is Horton’s response:

Horton does a good job of pushing back on several aspects of Holland’s account of Martin Luther and the German Reformation. So it is worth a listen!

That said, I think there is one point on which Holland is spectacularly correct, in that the Reformation precipitated a crisis of church authority which eventually and inevitably became a crisis of religious authority that birthed several skeptical movements of which atheism was one!

The Reformers’ criticism of Chuch authority included critiques of the papacy, the magisterium, tradition, and church councils, in favor of conscience and Scripture as the single bar for truth.

The same tools of scepticism that had been applied to the authority of the Pope and Roman church came to be applied to the authority entire Christian tradition itself. The result was a sliding scale of departure from the Christian tradition including Anabaptism, Unitarianism, Deism, Agnosticism, and Atheism. The proof - which I learned from The Rest is History podcast - is that during the early phase of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries appealed to Lutherans and Calvinists to be part of their coalition to overthrow the absolute monarchy of the very Catholic Ancien regime of France. If the Reformation was the attempt to purify and prune the Church of the unbiblical accretions of medieval traditions, it soon evolved into a purgation of more and more of historical Christianity.

Let it be said, that there were halfway points like the birth of Liberal Theology with Friedrich Schleiermacher which was an attempt to have religion within the bounds of reason. Modernist Christianity was not the attempt to destroy Christianity, much to the contrary, it was the attempt to save it, to make it palatable to modern ideas of culture and reason, and to put it into a meta-narrative of the evolutionary consciousness of humanity.

Whereas Luther could use Scripture as leverage against the Pope and medieval traditions, others would go further and apply the canons of reason as leverage against Scripture and the very notion of divine revelation. In addition, the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformation also meant that all things old were to be treated with suspicion, while new things and new ideas were given the heckler’s veto over the past.

Now I believe in the Reformation as the project of recovering the apostolic gospel, but in terms of unintended consequence, if you put Scripture and conscience at the forefront, then you are going to yield a multiplicity of voices and views about Scripture and true religion. In the end, everything will be up for debate and negotiation. Even the idea of a religion of revelation itself!

The Reformation did not invent atheism, but it threw a gallon of kerosene on its fires.