Christianity Not As Old as the Creation: The Last of Defoe’s Performances ed. by G. A. Starr (review)

There are two significant texts in this slim volume, each worth the price of the book. One is Mr. Starr’s edition of Christianity Not As Old as the Creation, an anonymous polemic against Deism published in May 1730, which Mr. Starr believes is “the last of Defoe’s performances.” The other is Mr. Starr’s 54-page introductory essay, which conclusively proves Defoe’s authorship of the book (though Mr. Starr modestly claims the attribution to be only “probable,” because all of his evidence is internal). Defoe’s point-by-point refutation of the errors of Deism provides the modern student of religion with a concise summary of the principles of that doctrine, while Mr. Starr’s masterful knowledge of the Defoe canon allows him to identify some two score phrases and points of doctrine in this work that closely or exactly replicate tropes used by Defoe multiple times in previous works. The result is an excellent model for any future attribution studies based on characteristics of word choice and style.

Defoe’s “last performance” was occasioned by the publication of Matthew Tindal’s Christianity As Old as the Creation in April 1730. Defoe was able to get his response into print within a month because he had made these same arguments, in the same words, so many times before. According to Tindal, the truths of Christianity were not new, but coextensive with the Creation; its doctrines were timeless, universal, and consistent with nature. God exists, and man was made in his image, full of benevolence, pity, and tenderness, but religion has transformed God into a deity “fierce, and cruel.” By challenging the miraculous elements of Scripture, the deists meant to restore religion, or the relation of God and man, to its prelapsarian state: in effect, to ask for a do-over. For Defoe, however, such a religion eliminated the need for a Redeemer, and so was not Christianity at all. Neither reason, nor idols, nor dogma, but only the word of God as revealed in Scripture could provide a sure path to salvation. Christianity could not be as old as the Creation because God, though just, was still angry, and there was still much work to be done before man would be redeemed.

Reading Defoe as a defender of orthodox Christianity is problematical. First, he was a believer in the “new sciences” that depended on observation and experiment, rather than classical texts, to explain the rules of nature, which seems inconsistent with the miraculous nature of Christianity; in Defoe’s fiction, Crusoe discerns the hand of Providence in the germination of barley grains and in the operation of tides, while stumbling over such mysteries as evil and the necessity of the Devil. Second, Defoe was a dissenter from orthodoxies of all sorts, as likely to quote lines from Lord Rochester as from Bishop Gibson in support of his argument on the insufficiency of reason as a guide to faith. Third, Defoe was a social reformer who demonstrated in his fictional works the instrumentality of laws to protect bankrupts, women abandoned by husbands, and orphans—all instances of evil due to chance or environment, not original sin. Defoe was also a risk taker, a gambler who plunged on civet cats and pantiles while declining the Deistical wager that there may be no afterlife. Mr. Starr informatively discusses each of these contradictions to the supposition of Defoe’s authorship, but shows that they are overbalanced by a preponderance of texts, ranging from his Serious Reflections through the Political History of the Devil to the New Family Instructor of 1727, which establish that, in the main, Defoe’s religious convictions were closer to the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646 than they were to any tract of the 1730s. Defoe was capable of flirting with many new ideas, but not with Deism.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this volume to Defoe...