Rescarch On The Religious Thoughts Of Hugh Blair

Religion, an important part of human consciousness, pushes forward the development of our society. In the eighteenth century, Scottish Enlightenment, following the success of religious revolution, is aimed to build a modern society in Scotland. Hugh Blair is regarded as Scotland’s most famous preacher, whose religious thoughts reflect the change in this age. Having inherited predecessors’religious thoughts, he brought the religious thoughts back to the secular life. The theme of Hugh Blair’s five volumes of Sermons is that belief leads to freedom of reclusive life and morality offers redemption to mundane life. This kind of religious thought solves the people’s anxiety in the eighteenth century and provides spiritual support for the modernization of Scottish society.This article, with the "questions" as the guide and the "explains of texts" as the acting point, explores the religious thought of Hugh Blair with the method of historical analysis, theoretically analyses some major issues in the development of the Christianity, compares Hugh Blair’thoughts to religious thoughts before the Scottish Enlightenment and magnifies the concerns of the age in this comparison. The paper is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is the Introduction, which presents a systematic introduction to Hugh Blair and his Sermons, and the next four chapters discuss the issues with the longitudinal historical narrative mode. This article chooses four Christian doctrine, namely " Ecclesiology", "Theory of God", "Predestination" and " Doctrine of Christ", which influence largely on modern people.Church is the representative institute of religion in the world, and the attitude of the church congregations is historically repetitive. The original church only had loose organization, but medieval church strengthened its role in the believers, which monopolized the interpretation of the bible, and act as the executor of redemption. After the reformation, the church had been challenged. Because secular kingship defeats the church, the church returned to the spiritual level. Blair divided the church into tangible one and intangible one, which represent requirements of the spirit and organization of the people. He thought the church had three marks, namely doctrine, sacraments and discipline, of which, obeying discipline and following order are the important functions of the church. Hugh approves of remaining sacraments such as pray and Holy Communion.The relationship between the church and the government is the main problem of the whole history of the church, but in the mid and late 18th century, Scotland’religious society has its own understanding and the handling way Blair advocates the harmonious coexistence between church and government in his sermons and praises the relationship between the British government and the church. Blair’s view is based on historical reasons, that after a long war, Scotland’s backward economy led to political consolidation between Scotland and England in 1707. This consolidation brought economic development opportunity, so Scotland elites, who were strongly in favor of the merger, certainly can see it. The main reason is that after the Presbyterian moderates took completely control of the state religion’ s meeting, church’s climate began to change and "progress" become the consensus of the Scots. In this inspired confidence and optimistic spirit and under the leadership of moderates in Scotland, Scottish began the cultural enlightenment movement. Being the church elders, Blair took part in the Enlightenment and also promoted the Enlightenment activities. His view of religion was the social needs of that of mundane life.God theory mainly involves God’s Person problems, namely the matter of trinity and Christology. Different previous study of theology concerning God and Christ, Blair barely discussed such in his sermons. He paid more attention to the role of God and how the people do with the God. On the role of god, Blair took little attention to God’s Almighty, while playing too much emphasis on the role of God in earthly life and instructing people how to treat God. When discussing Christ, he took less attention to Jesus’suffering, but stressed Jesus were always doing good as the son of human in the world and emphasized the moral character of Jesus. In the process of the significant change at that time, people’thought unprecedented becoming open and science and technology having great development, it is what place God stands that is the biggest confusion, which needs resolving as soon as possible. Blair’s God Theory did not mention the problem of God’s Person, but he focused on promoting the supremacy of God, how to know God’s Almighty and the attitude towards God in earthly life. As for Christ, he started from the morality of Christ and the service to earthly humanity, rather than from the person of Christ, and especially stressed the former while neglecting the latter, for he observed that Christian morality decides dignity of the Person matter. The first half century of the 18th century, the church really became a socially civilized agent organization until 1750 s the moderate part of the Presbyterian party controlled the church in that the Presbyterian church reformed the priest’s right of designation, the old Presbyterian leader died and evangelicals for rigid doctrine failed in the battle with other denominations holding the progressive view. At the same time, the Scottish intelligentsia germinates the Scottish Enlightenment. In fact, Blair’s idea of God and Christ seeks to reconcile Christian teachings and the Enlightenment. Blair’s sermons focus on rebuilding the religion as the impetus to society and humanity improvement, attempting to develop socialization and helping them make progress together.The section about human being is the critical part of the religion thoughts of Blair. From the perspective of the relationships between human’s soul and body, there exist two different views historically known as tribalism and dualism. On the basis of the question, there also exist different views on the heaven and the earth. Another important opinion concerning human being is the core notion of Christian-the sin, which leads to the Christian theology------guilt, sin and salvation. Blair sticks to dualism and places emphasis on how man can be saved from the perspective of expounding the sin of human being ---that is the combination of piety and secular morality. If Schleiermacher had classified Christian doctrine into historical or social speech system and then described it, Blair is thoroughly put Christian in human speech system, and from the point view of human being to examine or elaborate religion. Among the total of 90 lectures of five volumes,54 of them involve human emotion, the ethical and social values which occupy 60% per cent of the entire sermon. The rest 14 lectures are about how religion related to secular morality. In conclusion, the core of Blair’religious thoughts is the Doctrine of Christ, which is also his focus. From Blair’s Doctrine of Christ, he explained how people get along with themselves, in the process of social development, especially how to place humans soul when searching for material necessities with marketing economy increasingly developing. Blair put human being into three levels:sacred man、earthly man and internal man. He believes that human can be addressed as human only if he worships God, practices in earthly life, enables to love and unifies three levels discussed above. In this way, human can obtain happiness. Worshiping is the premises, practicing is the method, and love is the source. Without any one of them, one cannot acquire earthly happiness and God’s blessings. According to Blair, humanity is the most prominent feature and values of the eighteenth century so as to the eighteenth century is marked as enlightenment age. From the origin of Christian you can see that Doctrine of Christ essentially admits the concept of "original sin" whether the relationship between soul and body or human’s sin was discussed. In fact Doctrine of Christ was just intensified or weakened according to the differences between historical background and social environment. We can obviously see from Blair’s numerous sermons that he doesn’t place emphasis on original sin but probes into principle crime and researches how to deal with the relationship between soul and body in mundane life and how to obtain Gods favor so as to get salvation. These features are the react to the social progress of era as well as the religions self-regulation to adjust to the progress of the society.The other point that has to mention in Christian doctrine is Predestination. This article begins with Augustine and predestination of religious reformers and involves different views on predestination such as the choice of human awareness, divine mercy alone and cooperation between the man and God, absolute selection and limited selection and so on. From the Blair’s Predestination, we can see in the 18th century, some of the teachings of Calvinism have been loose, Hugh reiterates the crucifixion of Christ on behalf of people with the premise of God’s love and kindness. On the Voters issue, Hugh does not directly mention the concept, but from such colloquial words as "go to heaven", "God to lead" and "God’s promise" to show people how to get salvation. From Blair’s Sermons, It can be obviously seen that he advocated "cooperation between God and humanity". However, Blair dose not entangle in the discussion of theological issues, but in his sermons, he repeatedly delivered how people obtain salvage in earthly life. Moreover we can see the shadow of the "Soteriology" in Hugh’s predestination, and it is similar to Arminianism. This is because on the point of the emerging of modern society in the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers on the one hand wanted to release people from Virtue Theory on abstinence, ascetic model, and on the other hand to regulate and guide the people’s self-serving behaviors. When referring to predestination, he abstracted Divine Will and specified earthly practice with a view to the healing of human’s anxiety and the promotion of moral courage. Hugh’s sermons stress that citizen should do good and work hard and express his complete trust in the social order and the ruling class, which lays the spiritual foundations for the establishment of the Scottish’ Modern society. Hugh’s universal salvation thought reflects that as the Scots who should realize the sense of British identity with the England, which is also the consensus of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.The last part is to summarize the above four chapters with the reference to Blair’ s contribution. Blair followed the trends of age, echoed with the requirement of progress and applied his religious thoughts to the practice of preaching in the course of the social change of Scotland in the 18th century. In the prerequisite of maintaining religious authority and nobility, he advocated his religious thoughts of living in mundane life, making progress and working hard among massive Scottish congregation, which plays a significant role in pushing forward social revolution and development at that time. Sermons of Hugh Blair return to humanity from God stressed by Scottish Presbyterians religion, and pull the attention back to earthly life from kingdom of heaven, which successfully completed the transformation of the religion, also successfully make the religion as an integral part of human life. Thus, we can say it is Hugh Blair that in a didactic manner, in a way of writing, leads the process of religious humanism and the secularization in the 18th century’s Scotland and completes the combination of the thoughts of the church of Scotland and the enlightenment.