" during the latter part of the seventeenth and through the eighteenth centuries, while ordinary churchgoers continued to live in the world of the Bible, intellectuals were more and more controlled by the humanist tradition, so that even those who sought to defend the Christian faith did so on the basis that it was “reasonable,” that is to say, that it did not contradict the fundamental humanist assumption. "

― Lesslie Newbigin , The Gospel in a Pluralist Society