HIS 218 & REL 218 Church History II: Reformation to the Present

This book reassesses the relationship between Enlightenment and religion in England. It has long been accepted that liberal, rational dissenters developed an Enlightenment agenda, but most literature on this topic is out of date. These interdisciplinary essays provide a fresh analysis of rational dissent within English Enlightenment culture from a variety of viewpoints. Its wide perspective and new research make Enlightenment and Religion an important and original contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

This book is on the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England relating to the Enlightenment. It delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. The book challenges notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period.

The religious history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Protestantism was marked by a twofold movement. On one hand there were attempts to consolidate and reaffirm the heritage of the Reformation. On the other hand, we meet a growing critical evaluation of mainstream orthodox thought, which could lead to a process of gradual renewal and reorientation. Conservative as well as critical tendencies can be discerned in the religious landscape on both sides of the North Sea.

Contrary to popular belief, God not only survived the Enlightenment, but thrived within it. By exposing the Enlightenment's close ties to the traditions of the Renaissance, the passions of the Reformation, and the stirrings of globalization, 'God in the Enlightenment' offers a spectral view of the age of lights.

David Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment and demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Sorkin shows how a religious Enlightenment embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety.