David sorkin the religious enlightenment
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The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature.
Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He 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. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewis
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The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature.
Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He 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. Calvinist enlightened orthodox
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Four characteristics of the Religious Enlightenment
David Sorkin
The Enlightenment can no längre be seen as a secular or secularizing phenomenon. It had a huvud component of believers who constituted the ‘religious Enlightenment’, which cut across confessional lines and national borders; it included Protestants, Jews and Catholics. The Religious Enlightenment was characterized bygd a commitment to reasonable belief, which meant a balance between faith and reason, science and scripture. Reasonable belief was supported by updating inherited forms of exegesis, especially the principle of accommodation, which allowed religious enlighteners to reduce the ‘scope’ of Scripture to salvation, thereby eliminating extraneous historical elements. It was also characterized by a commitment to toleration grounded in ecclesiastical natural lag theory. All religious enlighteners advocated toleration, yet that toleration was selective. No one would tolerate atheist