If we look over all the accounts we have of the several nations of the earth, and consider everything that has been advanced by any or all of the philosophers, we can meet with nothing to induce us to think that the first religion of the world was introduced by the use and direction of mere natural reason.
Edwards believed that man's reason and speculations led to "false and ill-grounded notions" of the Creator. In Edward's view, divine revelation alone had provided man with the correct notion of the "true nature and the true worship of the deity." Edwards' was the Christian epistemology until the age of the enlightenment in the 18th century.
The period of the enlightenment was mainly a result of conditions in France and the relationship between the government and Roman Catholicism. The people began to question their ties to religion and the Bible. The French philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau gave the revolution justification for breaking from the old regime. At the core of the enlightenment period was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals. The ideas of this age bled into many other countries, culminating with the writings of Immanuel Kant in Germany and David Hume in Scotland. Kant defined the enlightenment as "man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity," and he went on to write that "religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonorable variety of all."
Deductive reasoning is often defined as pre-enlightenment thinking because it's based in the commonly held belief that God created the universe. Inductive reasoning is considered to be the scientific, non-religious formula that gained authority after the enlightenment. This follows from two different types of logic, deductive and inductive. In a deductive argument, the conclusion is said to be true if it follows from the premises. Deductive logic does not appeal to empirical evidence, so long as the premises are true and the argument is valid then the conclusion must be true. On the other hand, inductive logic is concerned with making generalizations about the empirical world based on observation. It is closely connected with experimental science, a particular type of observation. Garth Kemmerling, a well-known professor of philosophy with his PhD from the University of Iowa, writes (2002):
In a deductive argument, the truth of the premises is supposed to guarantee the truth of the conclusion; in an inductive argument, the truth of the premises merely makes it probable that the conclusion is true.
The original method of deductive logic based its premises on the presence of agreed upon truths which led to an otherwise unknowable conclusion. Christians accepted the Bible as the fountainhead for truth, but the enlightenment led to the criticism of the Bible as a dependable and authoritative source for such.
Dialecticism or Hegelianism
The new logic is a combination of deduction and induction in the form of a dialectic. Dialectic is rooted in the ordinary practice of a dialogue between two people who hold different ideas and wish to persuade each other. The aim of the dialectical method is resolution of the disagreement through rational discussion and ultimately the search for truth. At the root of dialecticism is the idea that there is no absolute truth. Truth comes from an ongoing synthesis of a thesis and antithesis to form a new and better thesis.
Most today also call this dialecticism Hegelianism, a philosophy developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and can be summed up by Hegel's philosophy that "the rational alone is real." His thought was that we take a concept where we first find it and combine it with an opposite one to find a higher, truer, richer, and fuller concept. Hegel's influence in the 19th century changed the entire nature of Christian theology by revolutionizing the means by which men acquired their beliefs. The application of his dialecticism led to the challenge of long accepted scriptural truths by historical investigation. New theologies emerged from the synthesis of the Bible and rational inquiry into external sources.
Before Enlightenment and Dialecticism
Before Hegel's dialecticism produced these historic investigations to synthesize with already established truth, men relied on biblical presuppositions to make their theological conclusions. This was the deductive logic mentioned earlier. During the time period preceding the enlightenment, Kurt Aland, world renouned textual critics reports ("The Text of the Church?" in Trinity Journal, Fall, 1987, p.131) a different mindset:
[I]t is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century orthodoxy's doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this Textus Receptus. It was the only Greek text they knew, and they regarded it as the 'original text.'
Kurt Aland's wife, Barbara Aland, writes in her book The Text of the New Testament (pp. 6-7):
[T]he Textus Receptus remained the basic text and its authority was regarded as canonical. . . . Every theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and not just the exegetical scholars) worked from an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament which was regarded as the "revealed text." This idea of verbal inspiration (i. e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text) which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus.
Christians before enlightenment believed they had a text verbally, perfectly preserved by God. They based that upon scriptural presuppositions, a logical deduction from promises of God in His Word. You see this position advocated as well in the Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession.
The original method of deductive logic was the position of sole scriptura. Christians took their bibliology from Scripture alone. They deduced from biblical promises that God had preserved His Words. They deduced from biblical instruction alone that the Holy Spirit had led the church to all truth. For that reason, they viewed not just the autographa, but the apographa as the very Words of God, verbally inspired. This understanding is reflected in the above quotes of Kurt and Barbara Aland. Pre-enlightenment believers viewed the Bibles in their hands as infallible in line with their sole scriptura.
Textual criticism is not the historic position of sole scriptura. When I've been on the road, I've visited some reformed Baptist churches. Many will have banners decorating their auditorium with the five solas at the front of the auditorium, to announce to anyone who visits their view of the world. The preaching starts and the pastor often begins reading out of the New American Standard Version. I mentally pull down one of his banners from his auditorium wall. He is lying to his people and the visitors either knowingly or ignorantly. He does not have the same epistemology as the history he espouses to represent.
Biblical Criticism, Textual Criticism, and Warfield
Despite the protests of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, Biblical criticism and textual criticism are two bedfellows of post-enlightenment thinking. They come out of the same philosophical underpinnings. What does Biblical criticism do? It says Scripture isn't trustworthy, not sufficient, and not good enough. It adds to the thesis of the Bible the antithesis of man's reasoning, science, and observations. The latter is the inductive logic relied upon post-enlightenment. I know that most conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists would want to reserve that category for solely the liberals.
Not so. Consider what Mark Noll writes in his book, Faith and Criticism, concerning Hodge and Warfield:
Hodge and Warfield, on the other hand, profess more willingness to let "induction" take its course and (perhaps) to doubt what merely appears to be "the plain implication" of biblical passages. For them, the recovery of the texts "in all their real affirmations" is the key. They stress that the books of the Bible "were not designed to teach philosophy, science, or human history as such," and that the writers depended on "sources and methods themselves fallible."
You should read the whole section here to get the flavor of it. Well, were Hodge and Warfield liberals? So what happened to them here? Of course, they were influenced by post-enlightenment empiricism and dialecticism. Noll continues on p. 29:
Theologians acquainted with recent scholarship advanced sophisticated arguments in defense of infallibility and of conservative literary conclusions. In this effort, B. B. Warfield led the way. His work was both negative, to strip concepts of "inerrancy" of mechanical or dualistic connotations, and positive, to affirm the right of critical, scientific study of the Bible within reasonable confessional guidelines.
What Warfield did was overturn the whole concept of infallibility as was believed by centuries of Christians. He created a new position that applied the newly coined word of "inerrancy" to only the original manuscripts. Why?
Christians believed that their Bibles were perfect, in the original languages identical to the autographa. Then began the scientific inquiry into the external evidence. Men began searching for copies. These scholars compared the manuscripts and found variations. They found older manuscripts with even more differences. Influenced again by the Hegelianism, they took the original thesis based on the truth of Scripture and combined it with their reasoning and observations to invent modern textual criticism. The old source of authority was no longer trustworthy or sufficient. It wasn't alone good enough.
The dialectic of Warfield was in view in his combining the Genesis account with evolution to form theistic evolution. Warfield's dogmatics were apparent as he agreed with the Westminister Confession that the New Testament text had been “kept pure in all ages” by God’s “singular care and providence,” but in the realm of New Testament textual criticism he agreed with Westcott and Hort in ignoring God’s providence. He staggered at the science of textual criticism.
Warfield bridged the gap between historically accepted scriptural truth and human observation by suggesting that God had worked providentially through Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort to restore the New Testament text. Of course, none of these claims anything at all like what one reads about the doctrine of preservation in Scripture. Warfield's dialectic leads to conclusions which are extremely bizarre and inconsistent---the text used by the Protestant Reformers was the worst of all, the true text was not restored until post-enlightenment, when Tregelles exumed it from the Pope’s library (Vaticanus) and Tischendorf rescued it from a waste basket on Mt. Sinai (Sinaiticus).
Out of these same conclusions Westcott and Hort did their work in the mid to late 19th century by using rules of textual criticism that were also applied to any other secular manuscript. They were considered to be scientific laws of literary forensics that would identify the text closest to the original. Concerning the work of Westcott and Hort, Mark Noll, no critic of the two, wrote (Faith and Criticism, p. 69):
Yet their work as a whole pushed further into the background the older view of the Bible as a divine gift from heaven.
The older view was the view of deductive logic, starting with scriptural presuppositions. The newer one was that of induction, combining the thesis of scripture with the antithesis of human reasoning and observation to produce a critical text of the New Testament with no claim to perfection either verbally or even theologically.