5) The priestly office of Christ is denied. He is prophet and He is king. All the ideas of substitute sacrifice or punishment or satisfaction are meaningless and self- contradictory, because guilt is always a personal thing and is attributed to individuals, and must be. But on the other hand, He is king and sits at the right hand of God and is really ruling and judging.
6) Justification is dissolved in a moralistic terminology. In order to be justified, we must keep the commandments. With respect to the state, passive resistance against the power forms of the state was favored.
7) Eschatology is dissolved; it is a fantastic myth. But the thing which remains – and which is important – is immortality: this must be preserved by all means.
Now here you have a lot of ideas which anticipate many elements of modern liberalism, and which anticipate the theology of the Enlightenment. What really remains in the Socinian criticism are the three theological ideas of the Enlightenment – god, freedom, and immortality – and nothing else. I like to quote Immanuel Kant in his little writing, “What is Enlightenment.”: The Enlightenment is man’s going out of his stage of inferiority, as far as he is responsible for it. Inferiority is the inability to use one’s own reason without the guidance of somebody else. This state is caused by oneself, if it is rooted in a lack of understanding and in a lack of resoluteness, a lack of courage, namely the courage to use one’s reason without the guidance of somebody else. :Venture to use your own reason,: is the advice of the Enlightenment. Kant continues to show how much more comfortable it is to have guardians and authorities, but he says this comfort has to be thrown away: man must stand upon himself; it is the nature of man to be autonomous.
This leads to the concept of autonomy: Rationalism and Enlightenment emphasize human autonomy. The word “autonomy” is not used in the sense of arbitrariness, of man making himself, of man deciding about himself, in terms of his individual desires and arbitrary wilfulness. Autonomy is derived from the Greek autos and nomos (self-law). It does not say, “I am a law unto myself,” but says that the universal law of reason, which is the structure of reality, is in me, and there I must face it. This concept of autonomy is often falsified by theologians who say this is the misery of man, that he wants to be autonomous but would be dependent on God. Now this is poor theology and poor philosophy, if you say that, because you don’t know what you are talking about! Autonomy is the natural law given by God, present in the human mind, present in the structure of the world. Natural law means mostly, in all classical philosophy and theology, the law of reason, which is Divine law.
Now following this law as we find it in ourselves: this is autonomy. Therefore autonomy is always connected with the strong, almost emphatic, obedience to the law of reason, and is stronger than any religious idea opposed to anything arbitrary.
The adherents of autonomy in the Enlightenment are very much opposed to any arbitrariness which they call., for instance, the Divine grace. They wanted to emphasize man’s obedience to the natural law of his nature and the nature of the world.
The opposite concept is heteronomy. Arbitrariness is actually heteronomy; it is the opposite of autonomy! Arbitrariness is given in the moment in which fear or desire determines our actions, whether this fear is produced by God or by society or by one’s own weakness. For Kant, the heteronomy, the authoritarian attitude of the churches – and even of God, if He is seen in an heteronomous light – is arbitrariness. Arbitrariness is subjection to authority, if this authority is not confirmed by reason itself. And then it is arbitrariness, because you subject yourselves on, the basis of fear, anxiety and desire.
