By Dominic Erdozain
It's broadly assumed that technological know-how is the enemy of non secular religion. the belief is so pervasive that complete industries of spiritual apologetics converge round the problem of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This ebook demanding situations such assumptions by way of offering a distinct reason for unbelief within the West: the Christian moral sense. Tracing a historical past of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, Dominic Erdozain argues that the main robust solvents of non secular orthodoxy were strategies of ethical fairness and private freedom generated by means of Christianity itself.
Revealing hyperlinks among the novel Reformation and early sleek philosophers equivalent to Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, Erdozain demonstrates that the dynamism of the Enlightenment, together with the very proposal of "natural cause" espoused by way of philosophers reminiscent of Voltaire, was once rooted in Christian ethics and spirituality. the ultimate chapters discover comparable topics within the period of Darwin and Marx, displaying how ethical rebellion preceded and transcended the demanding situations of evolution and "scientific materialism" within the unseating of non secular trust. the image that emerges isn't of a mundane problem to non secular religion, yet a sequence of theological insurrections opposed to divisive bills of Christian orthodoxy.
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Additional info for The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx
Sample text
Luther's Address to the Christian Nobility (1520) was a blistering assertion of the rights of ordinary believers against clerical power and a fierce defense of the inwardness of faith. ” In sharp and pungent German prose, he contrasted the chicanery required to defend the papacy with simple, biblical accounts of faith. Every believer was a priest. The notion of a “spiritual estate” of ordained clergy operating on a different level was a spurious “invention” leading to gross injustices. “If a priest is murdered, the whole country is placed under interdict,” Luther noted.
The command to perform good deeds, so that people “may see your good works and glorify your Father,” prompted the qualification that Matthew, “together with the other two evangelists, Mark and Luke, does not in his gospel treat so fully and profoundly upon the great subject of Christ as St. John and St. ”49 Luther was ranking the gospels according to his own criterion of sola fide, and he was redefining the meaning and status of “works” in the religious life. “By good works here [Matthew 5:16],” Luther insisted, “he means the practicing, illustrating and confessing the teaching concerning Christ,” not dundering philanthropies.
Luther himself took the initiative in treating absence from church as blasphemy, to be met with the threat of banishment and excommunication. ” Finally, the fiction of “blasphemy” was tacitly acknowledged. 71 “Protestantism” was born in unblushing contradiction. Luther’s invocation of Moses as a patron of legitimate coercion was a source of particular resentment in radical circles. Having distinguished the “old” and “new” covenants with such exultant finality, having extolled the virtues of Christ over Moses with sonorous eloquence, it was a matter of distress that Luther now claimed Moses as a model of salutary violence.