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.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Editors and Contributors Introduction: Enlightenment for the Culture Wars William J. Bulman 1: Godless Politics: Hobbes and Public Religion Justin Champion 2: Reason and Utility in French Religious Apologetics Anton Matytsin 3: Bernabe Cobo's Re-creation of an Authentic America in Colonial Peru Claudia Brosseder 4: From Christian Apologetics to Deism: Libertine Readings of Hinduism, 1600-1730 Joan-Pau Rubies 5: The Platonic Captivity of Primitive Christianity and the Enlightening of Augustine Paul C.H. Lim 6: God's Word in the Dutch Republic Jetze Touber 7: Suffering Job: Christianity Beyond Metaphysics Jonathan Sheehan 8: The Reformation Origins of the Enlightenment's God Brad S. Gregory 9: 'God' and 'the Enlightenment': The Divine Attributes and the Question of Categories in British Discourse J. C. D. Clark 10: Medicine, Theology, and the Problem of Germany's Pietist Ecstatics H. C. Erik Midelfort 11: Richard Bentley's Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza Sarah Ellenzweig Conclusion: The Varieties of Enlightened Experience Dale K. Van Kley
William J. Bulman is Assistant Professor of History at Lehigh University. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Vanderbilt and Yale. Robert G. Ingram is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University and Director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions.
Reviews for God in the Enlightenment
Brilliantly illustrates how approaches to secularity beyond liberal secularism can reveal richer descriptions of Enlightenment. William Bulman's introductory synthesis and the contributing essays deserve serious attention from any reader who hopes to muster history in the service of understanding religion and secularity today. --<em>The Immanent Frame</em> A stimulating collection of essays by distinguished scholars who present often radically revised evaluations of the Enlightenment and the place of religion within it . <em>God in the Enlightenment</em> provides an exceptionally useful and illuminating investigation of new directions in Enlightenment scholarship. The book should be of interest to anyone interested in the historical roots of the contemporary world, and the place of religion in it. --<em>Reading Religion</em> This work shines with essays from an intellectual diversity of important scholars and often strikingly original perspectives. It not only addresses the increasingly problematic interaction of religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in provocative and significant ways, it goes to the underlying issue of the place of God in Enlightenment debate, dilemmas, continuities, and reevaluations. This is a genuinely important collection. --Alan Charles Kors, Henry Charles Lea Professor History, University of Pennsylvania
