And Englishman, an American, a Frenchman.

Well, welcome back to another episode of five minutes

in church history, and Englishman an American a Frenchman a German and a Scott

walk into a library no that's not the beginning of a joke It is an episode here on five minutes in church history.

These are all five figures of the Enlightenment.

The Englishman is John Locke.

The American is Thomas Payne. The Frenchman is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The German? Well, that has to be

Emmanuel Kant. And the Scott is none other than David Hume.

These were all very significant thinkers

that dominated the philosophical, political,

cultural, theological conversations of the 1700s.

It began actually in the final decades of the 1600s with John Locke and goes right on through with the death of Emmanuel Kant in 1804. Well, what is the Enlightenment? We talk

about it a lot, this moment in the history of ideas.

Emanuel Con actually tackled this question himself with an essay that he titled,

What is Enlightenment?

And in the first sentence he writes,

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incured tutelage.

He's speaking of there of transitioning from being a minor to adult.

In the United States, the Magic Age is 18. Prior to 18, you're a minor, but at 18 you

have a new legal status. You are an adult and you are free. Well, Kant goes on to write, tutelage is man's inability to make use

of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incured is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason, but in lack of

of resolution and courage to use it own reason.

...