Thomas Aquinas. No sharp line can be drawn between the doctrines of such rationalistic theologians and those of deists, especially those who termed themselves "Christian deists." Nor is it accurate to maintain that the historical deists (mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), like the philosophical deists, altogether denied the immanence of God, even though they did tend to become more and more critical of the necessity of any revelation and of the Hebraic-Christian revelation in particular. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the two types of deists. The remainder of this entry will be devoted to a survey of historical deism.
Early History of Deism
To attempt to disentangle the antecedents of historical deism—intertwined as they are with rationalistic natural religion on the one hand, and with skepticism on the other—would indeed be foolhardy. Skepticism itself might end in Pyrrhonism or atheism or fideism. It is safe to generalize, however, that any tendency away from religious dogmatism, implicit faith and the mysterious, and in the direction of freedom of thought on religious matters, was in some measure a premonitory symptom of deism.
The earliest known use of the word deist was by Pierre Viret, a disciple of John Calvin, in his Instruction chrétienne (Geneva, 1564), Vol.
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