Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 33.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time we looked at the initial interpretation of the biblical data concerning the resurrection of Jesus,

and we saw that the church fathers held that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a literal event.

And this understanding of Jesus' resurrection persisted for over a millennium and a half until the dawning of the age

of modernity in 17th century Europe with the so-called Enlightenment. The Enlightenment refers to

this political and intellectual movement within European culture in the

17th and 18th century, in which the old order, what one called the Ancien regime, the old order,

was thrown off in the name of human autonomy

and human reason.

And there were two constituent institutions of the Ancien regime in particular that were thrown

over with modernity.

The first was the monarchy.

With the Enlightenment, you have the development of modern democratic states, and certainly

the most successful of these Enlight enlightenment political projects was the United

States of America, which is a product of the throwing off of the shackles of the monarchy

in the favor of democratic systems of government.

And even in those institutions that continue to have a monarch, the monarch

was basically stripped of all significant power and became a mere figurehead of the government.

The other institution which was closely associated with the monarchy in the Ancien regime was the church.

The church and the monarchy oppressed people, stifled human autonomy and human reason,

...