1043. Gerrish Argues . . .

[t]he eighteenth century did not invent the contrast between natural and revealed theology, but in the course of the Deist Controversy the inherited priority was reversed. The insufficiency of the light of nature had formerly been the basis of the Protestant appeal to Scripture: reason was unambiguously subordinated to revelation, and the mainline theologians did not expect to discover beyond Christianity anything but superstition and idolatry. Indeed, that is what the Puritans found in Roman Catholicism and even, in smaller measure, in Anglicanism. They agreed with Calvin's verdict that human nature is a 'perpetual factory of idols,' and that only Scripture can clarify 'the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds. . . .

The Deist Controversy in England led to a reversal of the old belief that the weakness or perversity of human reason required revelation to supplement and correct it: the Deists countered that every human claim to possess a revelation is subject to rational scrutiny. Fundamental to their approach was the view that naïve privileging of Christian discourse, resting as it did on the assumed possession of an unparalleled revelation, had to yield to a pluralist interpretation of Christianity as one religion among others.

The Deists were not all of one mind. But we find repeatedly in their writings the view that a pure religion is accessible to all by nature and that Christianity, like every other historical religion, partly exhibits the religion of nature, partly obscures and corrupts it. The familiar scheme of Protestant orthodoxy is turned upside down. Revelation does not, after all, clarify our confused natural knowledge of God; quite the contrary, our innate knowledge of God enables us to judge every pretended revelation and to sort out truth and error even in Christianity itself (Thinking with the Church: 12, xvi; Saving and Secular Faith: 90).

It was not Moses that was the author of the Decalogue, but from the foundation of the world the Decalogue has been inscribed on the hearts of all men. . . . For there has never been any nation under the sun so brutal or barbarous and inhuman as not to be aware (quin senserit) that God is to be worshipped and loved . . . even if it has gone astray in the manner and methods of worshipping God. Similarly with regard to honour and obedience toward parents and superiors; likewise they detested vices, as is to be seen in the first chapter to the Romans. . . . So Moses was only as it were the interpreter and illustrator of laws written on the minds of all men wherever they are in the world under the sun.

If the natural law were not written and given in the heart by God, one would have to preach long before the conscience were smitten. One would have to preach to an ass, horse, ox or cow for a hundred thousand years before they accepted the law, although they have ears, eyes and heart as a man. They too can hear it, but it does not enter their heart. Why? What is wrong? Their soul is not so formed and fashioned that such a thing might enter it. But a man, when the law is set before him, soon says: Yes, it is so, he cannot deny it. He could not be so quickly convinced, were it not written in his heart before (quoted by P.S. Watson, Let God Be God! 98, n. 44; 99, n. 52).