God in the EnlightenmentWilliam J. Bulman, Robert G. Ingram We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Hobbes and Public Religion | 42 |
2 Reason and Utility in French Religious Apologetics | 63 |
3 Bernabé Cobos Recreation of an Authentic America in Colonial Peru | 83 |
Libertine Readings of Hinduism 16501730 | 107 |
5 The Platonic Captivity of Primitive Christianity and the Enlightening of Augustine | 136 |
6 Gods Word in the Dutch Republic | 157 |
Christianity Beyond Metaphysics | 182 |
8 The Reformation Origins of the Enlightenments God | 201 |
The Divine Attributes and the Question of Categories in British Discourse | 215 |
10 Medicine Theology and the Problem of Germanys Pietist Ecstatics | 236 |
11 Richard Bentleys Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza | 257 |
The Varieties of Enlightened Experience | 278 |
| 317 | |
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Alan Charles Kors ancient Andean antiquarian apologetic argued argument Arminian atheism Augustine authority belief Bentley Bentley’s Bernabé Cobo Bernard Bible biblical Book of Job Cambridge University Press Catholic Christian Church civil claims Cobo’s Cocceians concept confessional contemporary Créquinière criticism critique culture debates Deism Deists divine doctrine Dutch Republic early Enlightenment early modern eighteenth century Enlight Enlightenment’s enment Europe European France French God’s Hinduism Historia del Nuevo historiography Hobbes Hobbes’s Hoffmann human hylozoism Ibid ideas idolatry Inca Indians intellectual interpretation J.G.A. Pocock Jansenist Jesuit Johann John John Toland Jonathan Israel Leibniz liberal lightenment London ment metaphysical Milton moral natural Nuevo Mundo original orthodoxy Oxford University Press Paradise Lost philosophical Pietist Platonism political Protestant Radical Enlightenment reason Reformation religion religious Revolution Rousseau scholarship Science scripture secular seventeenth century soul Souverain Spinoza theologians theology Thomas Hobbes thought tion Tiwanaku Toland tradition trans Trinity truth