Christian deism

Christian deism combines belief in God with deism’s rejection of ongoing divine intervention and supernatural revelation, while treating Jesus’s moral teachings as authoritative.

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Deism: The belief that reason and observation support a creator who does not intervene in the natural order. Christian deism adopts deism’s noninterventionist account of God.
Christianity: A religion centered on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian deism draws on Jesus while departing from many historic Christian doctrines.
Enlightenment: An intellectual movement emphasizing reason, criticism, and empirical inquiry, especially in eighteenth-century Europe and America. Its confidence in reason helped make natural religion a persuasive alternative to revelation.
Jefferson Bible: Thomas Jefferson’s edited Gospel compilation, which omits supernatural episodes and retains Jesus’s moral teachings. It gives a concrete example of separating Jesus’s ethics from supernatural claims.
Natural religion: Religious belief grounded in human reason and the natural world rather than revealed doctrine. It supplies a rational basis for belief without supernatural revelation.
Classical theism: The view that God creates and continuously sustains the world and can act within it. It differs from deism over God’s continuing activity in creation.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury: An English philosopher whose writings helped establish an early modern account of religion discoverable by reason. His natural-religion framework helped prepare the intellectual ground for deist Christianity.
Religious naturalism: An approach to religion that finds sacred or spiritual significance within the natural world without requiring supernatural claims. It shares an emphasis on nature while differing in whether a personal creator is affirmed.
Jesus: A first-century Jewish teacher whose life and teachings form the basis of Christianity. Christian deists retain Jesus as a source of moral teaching.
Unitarianism: A Christian theological tradition that rejects the doctrine of the Trinity. Some Christian deists have shared Unitarian critiques of orthodox doctrines, though the views are distinct.