Matthew Tindal

…represented by the “Christian Deist,” Matthew Tindal, who wrote Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel as a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730). After a century’s critique of the notion of divine revelation in the name of “Enlightenment,” Immanuel Kant thought that Christianity could and should…

Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), most learned of the English Deists, argued that the essential part of Christianity is its ethics, which, being clearly apparent to natural reason, leaves revelation superfluous. Thus the Deists, professing for the most part to be religious themselves, did much to reconcile…

…(Cooper), Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who should be included among the Deist writers. In subsequent works, Hobbes usually has been dropped from the list and John Toland included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of…

With that as his premise, Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) argued in his book Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) that Jesus had preached a gospel of “nature” that all of humankind could understand were it not for the perversions introduced by priests and other religious functionaries. Other Deist interpretations of…