Louisville Process Theology Network

Process Theology and Deism

Jan 13, 2006

Many of the founders of the United States believed that God designed and created the world but governed indirectly through natural laws that can be discovered by reasoning, observation, and experience. They rejected the idea that God is revealed to us by supernatural means; based on a theology known as "Deism."

The word "deism" is derived from the Latin word "Deus" for God. Early American Deists included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Ethan Allen, and Thomas Paine.

Historians say this theology was a logical outgrowh of the European Enlightment of the 17th Century which was inspired by the scientific advances of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Galileo and others. Thomas Paine summed it up like this. "God is the first power, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon."

One well-known expression of Deist thinking in the early United States is "The Life and Morals of Jesus" by Thomas Jefferson; which is frequently called "The Jefferson Bible." Jefferson described his book to Charles Thomson as "a paradigm of His doctrines made by cutting texts out of books and arranging them in pages of a blank book in certain order of time and subject."

He told John Adams that he was rescuing the philosophy of Jesus and the "pure principles which he taught" by selecting "the words only of Jesus. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to mankind."

In a letter to William Canfield, Jefferson wrote, "Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus."

Deism is not the same thing as Process Theology, of course. However, the two theologies share a common faith in free will and scientific knowledge. It makes you wonder what Jefferson, Franklin, and the others would think of Process Theology.