Peter Harrison, a distinguished historian of science, faith, and concepts, has profoundly formed modern scholarship on the interwoven histories of those domains. His acclaimed works—‘Faith’ and the Religions within the English Enlightenment (1990), The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Pure Science (1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007), and The Territories of Science and Faith (2017)—have dismantled simplistic “battle” narratives, usually revealing the theological foundations of modernity. In Some New World, Harrison takes on a brand new goal: the classes of “naturalism” and “supernaturalism,” which he argues should not timeless options of human thought however historic constructs rising from Western Christian theology.
Harrison’s daring thesis reframes the divide between “pure” and “supernatural” as a theological drama, with the time period “supernatural” arising within the medieval interval and “naturalism” solely solidifying within the nineteenth century. These classes, he argues, should not impartial or common however deeply embedded within the theological debates of Christianity’s previous. Trendy naturalism, Harrison contends, owes its secular framework to theological ideas like windfall and the legal guidelines of nature, which have been regularly reinterpreted through the Enlightenment as impersonal mechanisms.
The e book’s title, Some New World, is a deliberate inversion of David Hume’s dismissal of historic miracle accounts as relics of a “pre-scientific mindset” alien to fashionable rationality. Harrison provocatively means that secular naturalism—not the enchanted cosmos of earlier cultures—is the true anomaly in human historical past. This reversal underscores his central undertaking: deconstructing secular modernity’s self-conception as a rational overcome spiritual credulity. In doing so, he reframes modernity because the true “new world.”
The Phantasm of “Progress”
A very compelling theme is Harrison’s argument that theories of progress are repackaged variations of Christian eschatology. Simply as Christian theology envisions historical past shifting towards divine success, secular narratives depict human progress as inevitable and linear. A number of notable students within the first half of the 20th century made comparable claims. In his basic Which means in Historical past (1949), Karl Löwith, for instance, argued that fashionable philosophies of historical past, notably these emphasizing progress, have been secularized variations of Christian eschatology. He recognized thinkers like Hegel and Marx as repurposing Christian notions of redemption and success, with historical past seen because the unfolding of an final, rational finish. Earlier, Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Nature and Future of Man (1941-43), critiqued the Enlightenment’s confidence in progress, arguing that it was rooted in a naive optimism that ignored the enduring actuality of sin. He noticed this secular optimism as a distortion of the Christian hope for redemption. Earlier nonetheless was Hebert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of Historical past (1931), which uncovered the tendency of historians to impose a story of progress onto the previous, portraying earlier societies as inferior levels on the best way to modernity. Butterfield linked this tendency to Protestant historiography, which framed the Reformation as a decisive break with the “darkness” of the Center Ages. Even the Thomist thinker, Jacques Maritain, notably in works like True Humanism (1936), critiqued secular humanism for adopting Christian beliefs of progress whereas discarding their theological foundations. For Maritain, the outcome was an impoverished imaginative and prescient of historical past that lacked a transcendent function.
Aligning himself with this corpus of labor, Harrison connects progress narratives to Protestant critiques of Catholicism, notably cessationism, which confined miracles to biblical occasions and framed later claims as fraudulent. Enlightenment thinkers prolonged this framework, rejecting miracles altogether. This theological scaffolding grew to become the inspiration for secular naturalism, with “legal guidelines of nature” reworked from divine governance to impersonal mechanisms. By connecting progressivist theories to their theological origins, Harrison does greater than critique modernity’s self-image; he calls into query the neutrality and universality of its claims. If theories of progress should not purely “rational” however deeply indebted to Christian eschatology, they lose a few of their authority as neutral explanations of historical past. As an alternative, they seem as contingent merchandise of a selected cultural and mental custom.
The Contested Nature of “Perception”
Harrison additionally highlights the transformation of “perception” from relational belief to mental assent. Drawing on Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Which means and Finish of Faith (1963), Harrison traces the evolution of perception from relational belief (pistis) in early Christianity to propositional assent within the fashionable period. This shift, he argues, paved the best way for contemporary skepticism by reframing religion as an mental dedication requiring evidential justification. Thus, by basically historicizing ideas like naturalism, perception, and progress, Harrison challenges the belief that secularism represents a common trajectory. As an alternative, he reveals it as a contingent product of theological debates and their cultural aftermath.
Hume, Miracles, and the Invention of Perception
Harrison opens the primary chapter of Some New World with an intriguing archival element: David Hume, usually celebrated as a philosophical big, was categorized as a historian within the British Library’s twentieth-century catalogue. For Harrison, this classification isn’t any accident. It underscores the historic assumptions underlying Hume’s celebrated arguments—notably his critique of miracles, which Harrison argues rely upon “covert historic commitments” rooted in Enlightenment narratives of progress and cultural superiority (14).
Hume’s critique of miracles, articulated in Of Miracles (a part of An Enquiry Regarding Human Understanding), hinges on the concept miracles are “violations of the legal guidelines of nature” and due to this fact inherently inconceivable. For Hume, the cumulative testimony supporting the consistency of pure legal guidelines outweighs any single account of a miraculous occasion. Nonetheless, Harrison critiques this reliance on testimony as paradoxical. Whereas Hume relies on testimony to affirm pure legal guidelines, he dismisses reviews of miracles from “ignorant and barbarous nations” as inherently untrustworthy. This dismissal reveals Hume’s Eurocentric bias, privileging Western rationality whereas casting different societies as irrational or primitive.
Harrison extends his critique by demonstrating that Hume’s understanding of miracles presupposes a contemporary idea of pure legal guidelines unavailable to pre-modern societies. By retroactively imposing this framework, Hume distorts the phenomena he critiques. Moreover, Hume’s depiction of faith as a system of propositional beliefs requiring evidential justification displays a distinctly fashionable shift within the understanding of religion. Harrison underscores the theological roots of this shift: the seventeenth-century idea of “legal guidelines of nature,” central to Hume’s argument, originated inside a theistic framework that attributed these legal guidelines to divine governance. Hume’s secularization of this idea exemplifies a key theme in Harrison’s work—the deep indebtedness of recent naturalism to theological traditions it claims to transcend. In the end, Hume’s critique of miracles can’t be disentangled from the cultural and theological milieu of eighteenth-century Britain.
Whereas Harrison doesn’t explicitly hyperlink Hume’s critique of miracles to Protestant anti-Catholic polemics, different students have explored this connection. For example, Stephen Buckle, in Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument In opposition to Miracles (2000), argues that Hume’s critique is formed not solely by philosophical reasoning but additionally by the spiritual debates of his time, notably the Protestant emphasis on cause and its rejection of Catholic miracle claims. Hume’s arguments, Earman suggests, are as a lot a product of eighteenth-century theological and cultural tensions as they’re of Enlightenment rationalism. Whereas Harrison doesn’t develop this Protestant anti-Catholic theme on this chapter, he makes it central to a later a part of his e book, the place he additional explores the theological currents shaping Enlightenment naturalism.
As he hinted within the introduction, within the second chapter Harrison now turns to how the idea of “perception” has advanced throughout cultures and historic contexts, arguing that the fashionable Western notion of perception as propositional assent shouldn’t be common however traditionally contingent. Drawing on anthropological, linguistic, and historic research, he argues that intellectualized perception has not all the time been central to spiritual follow and is, in actual fact, a traditionally contingent idea.
Harrison begins with Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard’s (1567-1622) wrestle to translate the Christian Credo (“I imagine”) into Mi’kmaq, illustrating the issue of conveying summary perception to cultures that prioritize communal and experiential spirituality. He cites additional ethnographic research, comparable to these of the Wari’ folks of the Amazon and the Dinka of South Sudan, to help his declare that Western ideas of perception are formed by particular theological and linguistic developments.
Central to his argument is the competition that early Christian pistis (Greek) and fides (Latin) have been primarily relational, signifying belief in God and the Christian neighborhood moderately than propositional assent. Harrison traces how this relational understanding advanced into “proper perception” by means of institutional adjustments within the Church, such because the formalization of doctrine within the Nicene Creed. Drawing on students like students like Teresa Morgan, particularly her Roman Religion and Christian Religion: Pistis and Fides within the Early Roman Empire and Early Church buildings (2015), Harrison attributes this shift to the Church’s rising emphasis on authority and its routinization of charismatic management.
Whereas Harrison’s evaluation is characteristically erudite and thought-provoking, it raises questions. First, his declare that “there may be little proof that religion was understood primarily as proper perception, or as assenting to propositions” (34) seems to understate the doctrinal components current in early Christianity. Students like J.N.D. Kelly (Early Christian Creeds) and Robert Louis Wilken (The Spirit of Early Christian Thought) emphasize the centrality of creedal statements in early Christianity, displaying that doctrinal beliefs have been integral to the religion from its inception. Larry W. Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity) additional demonstrates how early Christian worship was inseparable from particular beliefs about Jesus’ divinity. These scholarly works and others problem the notion that early Christianity lacked a deal with propositional beliefs. Whereas it’s true that lived follow and neighborhood have been very important points of early Christian life, doctrinal formulations performed a vital position in defining and preserving the religion.
Second, whereas Harrison attracts parallels between Greek faith and the New Testomony references to pistis (36), this, too, is a debatable level. Certainly, one of many hallmarks of early Christianity was its distinctive conception of pistis, which arguably aligns extra intently with the covenantal loyalty discovered within the Hebrew custom than with the philosophical or spiritual notions of pistis in Greek thought. To make certain, in Greek tradition, pistis usually denoted belief or confidence in human relationships, notably in social and political contexts. For example, in Homeric epics, pistis is linked to reliability and loyalty amongst allies. Philosophically, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle related pistis with persuasion or perception as a decrease cognitive state in comparison with data (episteme). In Greek faith, the gods have been objects of worship and ritual observance moderately than epistemological assent. Spiritual follow emphasised appeasement by means of choices and rituals moderately than the covenantal loyalty that characterizes biblical religion.
Nonetheless, the Hebrew equal of pistis, emunah, appears to convey a relational belief deeply rooted in propositional beliefs, as articulated within the Torah and the covenants. It displays a deeply relational dynamic between God and his folks, grounded in God’s constancy to his guarantees and the reciprocal loyalty of his followers. Biblical examples like Exodus 14:31, the place Israel’s belief in God follows his deliverance on the Purple Sea, present how relational belief and propositional truths have been intertwined. This belief shouldn’t be blind however is predicated on a set of propositional truths about God: his energy, his faithfulness to his guarantees, and his covenantal relationship with Israel. Equally, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) combines relational loyalty with doctrinal assertions about God’s oneness. Passages like Habakkuk 2:4 (“the righteous shall reside by his faithfulness”) additionally illustrate the centrality of this belief, which encompasses perception, motion, and covenantal obedience. Whereas emunah encompasses relational loyalty and belief, it additionally presupposes a cognitive dedication to sure truths about God.
It was this mixture that profoundly influenced early Christian conceptions of pistis, which additionally set them aside from different Greek spiritual traditions. Certainly, the New Testomony continues this dynamic. Jesus’s calls to imagine in him (e.g. John 14:1) and Paul’s writings on religion (e.g. Romans 10:9) combine belief and doctrinal content material. Early Christian creeds, just like the Apostles’ Creed, exhibit the Church’s emphasis on articulating core beliefs, each as communal affirmations and as doctrinal boundaries in opposition to heresy. As Hurtado argues, early Christian worship was characterised by a particular devotion to Jesus as Lord, which included each relational belief and propositional perception. This devotion was expressed in confessional formulation, hymns, and baptismal creeds, which required converts to articulate doctrinal commitments, comparable to perception in Jesus’s divinity and his resurrection.
Whereas Harrison attracts parallels between pistis within the New Testomony and Greek spiritual thought, this comparability dangers flattening Christianity’s distinctive theological improvements. Not like Greek faith’s transactional rituals, early Christianity provided a covenantal relationship with God rooted in particular theological claims, comparable to Jesus’s divine id and mission. This fusion of relational and propositional components marked Christianity’s departure from each Greek and Jewish traditions.
Paradoxically, Harrison’s portrayal of early Christian “perception” as primarily relational moderately than doctrinal echoes points of nineteenth-century German mediating theology—a practice whose broader implications Harrison critiques elsewhere within the e book. Figures comparable to Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Shailer Mathews, and lots of others on the flip of the century, championed the experiential and relational dimensions of religion, emphasizing private piety and the sensation of absolute dependence on God because the essence of faith. In doing so, nonetheless, these theologians downplayed doctrinal adherence, favoring a extra subjective and individualistic understanding of Christianity.
Mediating theologians aimed to navigate a center path between orthodox confessionalism and rationalist liberalism, reconciling conventional Christian beliefs with the mental currents of their time. This strategy confronted sharp criticism from extra conservative theologians of the identical period, who argued that doctrinal orthodoxy was important to preserving the integrity of the Christian religion. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, John Henry Newman, Charles Hodge, Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth, to call just some, all defended the primacy of conventional doctrines, cautioning in opposition to the potential relativism and theological erosion inherent in prioritizing particular person expertise over communal and creedal requirements.
This rigidity can also be evident in Harrison’s dialogue of medieval heresies. He contends that the suppression of heresies was pushed extra by sociopolitical stability than by theological purity, implying that propositional perception was a secondary concern (48). Nonetheless, the Church’s twin position as each a non secular and temporal authority meant that heresies represented threats on a number of fronts. The theological dimension, removed from secondary, was integral to the Church’s mission and id. The writings of Church Fathers and medieval theologians exhibit a profound preoccupation with heretical doctrines as theological deviations that endangered the religion. Certainly, figures like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine devoted vital parts of their works to refuting heretical teachings. Later, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae supplies meticulous refutations of heretical positions, additional emphasizing the significance of right perception to Christian orthodoxy.
The Church’s suppression of heresies was due to this fact inherently tied to the precept of particular person assent to doctrinal reality. Councils like Lateran IV (1215) explicitly condemned heretical doctrines, whereas public recantations symbolized the Church’s insistence on aligning private perception with its teachings. Even the inquisitorial course of, controversial although it was, presupposed that people might and may align their beliefs with right doctrine. Harrison’s deal with the sociopolitical dimensions of heresy suppression dangers making a false dichotomy, undervaluing the theological imperatives that formed these efforts.
To make certain, Harrison does admit that “doctrines, teachings, and cosmological assumptions have been integral [my emphasis]” to the lifetime of the Church (58). However his general evaluation right here appears to mirror a broader pattern inside some strands of theological and historic scholarship that prioritize relational and experiential points of religion over doctrinal or propositional components. This pattern usually emerges as a critique of recent, Western, and post-Enlightenment conceptions of faith, which have a tendency to cut back spiritual perception to mental assent to summary propositions. Whereas this critique holds some benefit, Harrison’s emphasis seems to overcorrect, underestimating the integrative position of doctrinal content material in early Christian and biblical traditions.
The Assault on “Implicit Religion”
Harrison is nearer to the mark in his critique of the Protestant Reformation’s contribution to the rise of instrumental cause. He rightly identifies how the Reformation’s emphasis on particular person interpretation of Scripture and rejection of ecclesiastical authority inadvertently inspired a rationalistic and evidential strategy to spiritual perception. This shift aligned with the mental currents of early modernity, the place cause more and more grew to become a device for evaluating the justification of perception based mostly on proof. Whereas empowering in some respects, this improvement in the end posed challenges for the coherence and accessibility of religion, as instrumental cause proved each philosophically unattainable as an absolute commonplace and virtually impractical for a lot of believers.
In his third chapter, Harrison examines the transformative evolution of religion, tracing its shift from the medieval mannequin of “implicit religion” to the Reformation’s demand for private accountability and rational justification. He argues that this shift profoundly formed fashionable epistemology, laying the inspiration for what he calls the “ethics of perception.”
Harrison begins with one other anecdote from Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard, who refused to baptize people unable to articulate doctrinal beliefs. Based on Harrison, this marked a departure from the medieval Church’s acceptance of implicit religion, wherein baptism and communal participation sufficed for Christian id. Harrison situates this inside Augustine’s view that baptism initiated believers into religion, offering a pathway for later mental understanding. Implicit religion, grounded in belief within the Church’s authority, was additionally championed by Aquinas, who distinguished between the perfect of specific doctrinal understanding and the sufficiency of implicit religion for these with restricted comprehension.
However once more, some pushback is feasible right here. Whereas it’s true that baptism and communal participation have been thought-about foundational components of Christian id within the medieval interval, many theologians certainly demanded extra from believers, notably regarding doctrinal understanding and private dedication. Anselm emphasised that religion was not merely passive belief or communal affiliation however an energetic mental endeavor to understand the truths of the Christian religion. His Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo illustrate the need of deep theological reflection as a vital facet of religion. Whereas Aquinas did affirm the sufficiency of implicit religion for many who lacked the capability for full doctrinal comprehension (e.g. the uneducated or youngsters), he concurrently emphasised the need of specific religion for many who have been succesful. Within the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 2, a. 1-10), Aquinas argued that specific perception in foundational doctrines, such because the Trinity and the Incarnation, was required for salvation for these in a position to comprehend them.
At any price, in response to Harrison, the notion of “implicit religion” was upended with the Reformation. Reformers like Luther and Calvin insisted that true religion required particular person assent and understanding. Luther’s dictum that “each man is chargeable for his personal religion” and Calvin’s dismissal of implicit religion illustrate this radical shift (71). Religion, Harrison contends, was redefined as a deeply private accountability, aligning with the emergent “ethics of perception,” wherein beliefs demanded rational justification.
Harrison connects this Protestant ethos to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, whose Essay Regarding Human Understanding framed perception as each an ethical responsibility and a rational obligation. This trajectory culminated in William Clifford’s nineteenth-century essay “The Ethics of Perception,” which argued that holding beliefs with out enough proof was morally indefensible. Harrison highlights this cultural shift: perception reworked from a communal, relational belief into a person epistemological accountability.
Whereas Harrison acknowledges the essential inquiry this transformation enabled, he critiques its unintended penalties. The Reformation’s emphasis on rational justification, he argues, paved the best way for instrumental cause—procedural and calculative approaches to perception that always undermined its relational and devotional dimensions. This rigidity, Harrison notes, lies on the coronary heart of modernity’s fragmented understanding of non secular life.
Harrison additionally attracts on Hegel as an example the philosophical implications of the Reformation’s deal with particular person cause and autonomy. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies the Reformation as a decisive second within the improvement of self-consciousness and freedom. For Hegel, Luther’s insistence on the primacy of particular person religion marks a turning level the place subjective conscience supplanted institutional mediation because the locus of non secular authority. This, Hegel suggests, initiated a extra common and rational spirituality.
Apart from Locke, Harrison discusses the work of William Chillingworth (1602–1644), who additional exemplifies this mental trajectory. A seventeenth-century Anglican theologian, Chillingworth epitomized the Protestant emphasis on particular person judgment and cause in issues of religion. In his controversial work The Faith of Protestants: A Secure Strategy to Salvation (1638), Chillingworth argued that Scripture and cause, moderately than ecclesiastical authority, ought to arbitrate spiritual perception. His protection of Protestantism in opposition to Catholic critiques centered on particular person conscience and rational inquiry as important for genuine religion.
Harrison makes use of Chillingworth as an example how the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical authority led to a reconfiguration of religion. By prioritizing rational inquiry, Chillingworth contributed to the mental local weather that fostered instrumental cause—a improvement Harrison sees as each a energy and a limitation of the Reformation’s legacy. “The Protestant critique of implicit religion,” Harrison writes,
Represents the primary articulation of a tightly linked set of ideas that are actually virtually universally endorsed within the West: that people needs to be left to make up their very own minds within the spheres of faith, morals, and politics; that claims about necessary issues of reality shouldn’t be taken on the idea of authority alone; that we now have an obligation to not maintain beliefs with out having the ability to supply some sort of justification for them (85).
Harrison rightly notes that “cause” has all the time carried theological implications, tracing its divine associations from historic Greek thought to early Christian theology. For the Greeks, cause was linked to the divine: Plato thought-about it the soul’s highest college, and Aristotle seen the contemplative life as god-like (bios theoretikos). The Stoics emphasised the rational order of the cosmos (logos), which people might apprehend by means of their rational capacities. Early Christian thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor constructed on these concepts, understanding human cause as a mirrored image of the imago Dei and depending on divine illumination to understand final reality. This integration of cause and revelation created a concord later reinterpreted and challenged through the Reformation and Enlightenment.
Whereas fashionable readers might discover the theological grounding of cause puzzling, Harrison attributes this to the present-day assumption of a stark divide between “pure” and “supernatural.” Within the premodern worldview, the human soul was understood as porous to divine exercise, making cause “deeply theologically inflected” (93). Early fashionable thinkers, comparable to Descartes, Malebranche, Charleton, and Cudworth, continued to floor cause in its divine origins, asserting that human rationality mirrored God’s rational nature. Harrison notes, “The last word basis of rational data . . . continued to be God” (96).
Nonetheless, the Protestant Reformers disrupted this concord. Luther and Calvin, cautious of cause’s corruption by sin, relegated it to secular and pure domains, reinforcing a dualism between religion and cause. Luther famously described cause as a “leprous whore,” expressing mistrust in its means to grasp divine truths. Calvin, whereas much less extreme, additionally seen cause as compromised by the Fall (101). He acknowledged its means to discern points of the pure world and fundamental ethical truths (sensus divinitatis), however denied its capability for saving data of God. Harrison broadens this dialogue by connecting Protestant skepticism about cause to figures like Ockham and Pascal. Ockham’s nominalism and voluntarism, specifically, set the stage for a narrower understanding of cause that later influenced skeptical philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (106). Certainly, Harrison contends that Hobbes’s materialist philosophy, which lowered actuality to mechanistic interactions of matter, prolonged Ockham’s rejection of metaphysical universals and led to a extra secular framework of data.
This mental trajectory is well-documented, and Harrison cites students comparable to Michael Allen Gillespie, John Milbank, Louis Dupré, and Thomas Pfau. “Nominalism, together with voluntarism, was thus destined to depart an indelible mark on subsequent theology, politics, and the pure sciences,” Harrison observes, “selling a revised understanding of human cause” (106).
Harrison deepens this evaluation by exploring the rise of “rational faith” through the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Locke and Paley sought to harmonize Christianity with rational inquiry, whereas Deists like Tindal and Paine argued that cause alone sufficed for spiritual truths. Rational faith emphasised pure theology and common ethical ideas, downplaying conventional doctrines and mysteries. Harrison connects this motion to the mental tradition of Diderot and d’Alembert and their Encyclopédie, which championed cause and empirical inquiry as instruments for human progress, usually on the expense of institutional faith.
The rise of instrumental cause thus afforded new types of pure theology and rational proofs for God existence. Harrison returns to this dialogue in a later a part of his e book, however within the remaining part of chapter three he examines the rise of “experimental pure philosophy,” which revisits themes from his earlier work, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Pure Science and Fall of Man. He argues that the Protestant idea of “experiment,” tied to private encounters with God, influenced empirical methodologies in early fashionable science. Figures like Boyle and Bacon rejected conventional authorities, emphasizing firsthand commentary and verification. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in verba (“Take nobody’s phrase for it”), encapsulated this ethos, mirroring the Protestant rejection of ecclesiastical mediation.
Whereas early science retained theological motivations—Boyle, as an illustration, noticed inquiry as an act of worship revealing God’s order—Harrison exhibits how this legacy of empirical rigor regularly distanced science from its spiritual roots. He extends this trajectory to the nascent social sciences, notably anthropology and sociology. Early thinkers like Max Weber and Émile Durkheim tailored Protestant frameworks of particular person accountability and empirical inquiry to review human society (126). This improvement, Harrison notes, carries an ironic twist: mental actions usually seen as resulting in secularization—such because the Enlightenment and the rise of the social sciences—drew closely on theological improvements from the Reformation. By remodeling spiritual authority moderately than abandoning it, these actions perpetuated many Protestant considerations in secularized types.
Harrison masterfully connects the Reformation’s theological shifts to the broader epistemological and cultural currents of modernity. His evaluation of cause’s theological origins and its eventual secularization is especially compelling, as is his exploration of the parallels between Protestant experimental faith and early scientific methodologies. By tracing these continuities, Harrison underscores how theological improvements laid the groundwork for a few of modernity’s defining mental trajectories.
Nonetheless, Harrison’s remedy of Protestantism would profit from better nuance. He usually portrays Protestantism as a unified drive driving these transformations, however as I’ve argued elsewhere, these developments are extra precisely attributed to a selected stream of Protestant thought—specifically, the liberal custom rising from the Elizabethan Settlement.[1] This model of Protestantism, a through media (“center manner”), prioritized compromise and flexibility, creating mental areas the place particular person interpretation and rational inquiry might thrive. It was not Protestantism as a complete however this specific pressure that almost all intently aligned with the cultural and epistemological shifts Harrison describes.
This narrowing of focus helps make clear the historic dynamics at play. The Elizabethan Settlement’s strategic stability between doctrinal authority and pragmatic tolerance fostered the mental pluralism that later fed into Enlightenment beliefs. By generalizing Protestantism as a monolithic motion, Harrison dangers obscuring the theological and cultural range inside the Reformation and overlooking the distinctive contributions of particular contexts to the rise of instrumental cause and fashionable epistemology.
Harrison’s exploration of Protestantism’s mental legacy however presents profound perception into how deeply modernity is formed by theological underpinnings. By exposing the spiritual roots of seemingly secular ideas, Harrison challenges the simplistic narrative of an irreconcilable rupture between faith and cause, as an alternative providing a richly interwoven account of their shared historical past.
This dialogue, nonetheless, is simply the start. As Harrison strikes past the Reformation’s affect, he probes into how these theological developments formed the emergence of recent naturalism, with its triumphs and its pitfalls. Within the subsequent a part of this assessment, I’ll study Harrison’s evaluation of the shifting boundaries between the “pure” and the “supernatural”—a distinction that might come to redefine the mental panorama of modernity. By historicizing these classes, Harrison invitations readers to query their taken-for-granted assumptions in regards to the secular age.
[1] See James C. Ungureanu, Science, Faith, and the Protestant Custom: Retracing the Origins of Battle (College of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), esp. 104-145.
