"The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries"

were marked, Welch observes, by "the antidogmatic, antiethnusiastic temper of an age tired and disgusted with religious controversies." [29] The rationalism of the Enlightenment was "antidogmatic," and therefore it was anticreedal and anticonfessional.  

In the celebrated definition by Immanuel Kant, the "Englightenment is man's exodus from his self-imposed tutelage" a tutelage that had expressed itself "in indecision and lack of courage to use the mind without the guidance of another." 

Or, in Paul Tillich's definition, the Enlightenment was "the revolution of man's autonomous potentialities over against the heteronomous powers which were no longer convincing." 

For many disciples of the Enlightenment, including its theological disciples, creeds and confessions were among the most obvious examples of such a "self-imposed tutelage." 

The rejection of creeds and confessions as "heteronomous powers" and as "no longer convincing," together with a "disgust with religious controversies," was a less obvious example of such a "revolution." 

For "it's plain from Church Histoy," the Deist Matthew Tindal wrote in 1730, "that Creeds were the spiritual Arms, with which contending Parties combated each other; and that those who were the Majority invented such unscriptural Terms, as they thought their adversaries wou'd most scruple, in Order to the stripping them of their Preferments." 

An Enlightenment thinker like Thomas Jefferson, nominal Anglican though he remained at least officially, strove to go back behind the creeds, and even behind the canonical Gospels as they had been transmitted by an orthodox and creedal Christendom, to find the authentic figure of the human Jesus as the teacher of a rational and universal faith, to set him free from creed and dogma, and to see genuine--and therefore non-creedal and nondogmatic--religion and morality as embodied in him.

--Jarsolav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 490.