Christ-imitating social enlightenment arose from the New Testament ethos, but rarely through the established Church. The Enlightenment thinkers were denounced as heretics. Secularists and deists, the very people the Church most hated and feared formed and articulated Enlightenment policies. Thus Jesus’ prophetic theme of a building founded on the corner stone “rejected by the builders” (Psalm 118:22) continued replicating in the humanist Enlightenment. In spite of being largely rejected by the Church a new Jesus-leavened order was born.
