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I have for some years laid the decline of the western Christianity at the feet of decartes—whose categorization of the sciences is the basis for all higher education. alas decartes placed theology as a branch of philosophy in the same group as witch craft. Alas, whereas witchcraft if a primitive science that mostly botches cause and effect—theology does not belong on the tree of knowledge at all—because it begins in God. Whereas philosophy begins in man.

Packer lays the decline—at least in reformed theology for two centuries— at the feet of a unitarian polish theologian named Socinus. (however Socinus church converted Newton)

Here’s the passage:

The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus’ critique on Reformed scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy. It forced them to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the various parts of their position, which was good, but it also led them to fight back on the challenger’s own ground, using the Socinian technique of arguing a priori about God as if he were a man — to be precise, a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch, head of both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every point. So the God of Calvary came to he presented in a whole series of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as successfully avoiding all the moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view.2 But these demonstrations, however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and Hodge, to name but two,3 were very skilful indeed), had builtin weaknesses. Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory, analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic. They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faith — more like a puzzle, we might say, than a gospel. What was happening? Just this: that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game, Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of God’s work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government, drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought. Thus, in their zeal to show themselves rational, they became rationalistic.4 Here as elsewhere, methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud, leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower.http://www.the-highway.com/cross_Packer.html