Day 14. October 2, 2006
Movement 1. Dei Filius
Lecture 6. Jesus and the Enlightenment (Part 3)
For most of the founders of the U.S., Jehovah was America's God, not Jesus. Unlike most of his peers, Thomas Jefferson talked and wrote much about Jesus. Though he was a critic of organized religion and the priestly class and an advocate for religious disestablishment, he believed that true religion - natural religion - would emerge from competition among religions. Nonetheless, like Franklin he believed that Jesus was important as a moral and ethical model. But in subtle difference with Franklin who argued that the preservation of social order required inculcation in the citizenry of precepts derived from moral models such as Jesus and Socrates, Jefferson contended that Jesus modeled republican virtues for the benefit of individual citizens. Neither Franklin nor Jefferson explicitly considered that Jesus could provide a model for social reform, an idea that arose later. That later Jesus as well as the Jesus of Franklin and the Jesus of Jefferson differed from Jonathan Edwards' earlier sweet Jesus who eased human acceptance of God's absolute sovereignty. All of these are present yet in American life.