Title: Selections from literature of theology and church history
Description: The history of theology and organized Christianity in Britain during the long nineteenth century is rich in both modernizing and "restorationist" impulses. The historian of religion James C. Livingston argued that the period was one in which Christianity responded to the intellectual challenges posed by the modern world in one of three ways: accommodation, resistance, or reinterpretation to assure coherence with modern science, history, and social experience. Modernity, for the purposes of a history of Christian thought, Livingston said, can be most usefully understood as the period in which the Church was divested of its political power and the secular state grew in alliance with a rapidly developing secular economic capitalism, a secular natural science, and dramatic technological advance. The authority of church hierarchy that existed in the medieval world was drastically diminished and in its place grew the radical notion that individuals and groups could best contribute to social, political, and intellectual progress if they had the freedom to carry out critical inquiries. The importance of revelation was challenged by a new faith in reason. By the end of the eighteenth century, individual autonomy and reason came to be associated not only with cold logic but with the heat of personal experience. The Age of Reason, Livingston said, was enlarged and enriched by Romanticism. Romanticism, in turn, stimulated a new interest in past historical periods. The diverse and conflicting theological and church-based movements that arose in the long nineteenth century, Livingston said, had this entire complex intellectual and social context in common. The more than fourteen hundred monographs assembled in this digital collection document both the major schools and the minor byways of this 130-year period of religious thought as experienced in Britain. The normative natural theology of William Paley can be contrasted with the Romantic rebellion against it. Included are the theological works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose revolt against Deism is said to have inspired the Anglican ecumenicalism of F.D. Maurice and the Catholic revivalism of John Henry Newman, as well as his German contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher, a thinker characterized by Livingston as the most important Protestant theologian between John Calvin and Karl Barth. Many texts here discuss the romantic outlook of the Oxford Movement, which turned to the Catholic ritual of the Middle Ages to restore the church, examining in particular the work of one its leaders, Edward B. Pusey. British neo-Hegelian thought, in which Christianity is understood as the absolute religion, is represented here by monographs authored by John and Edward Caird. Monographs of the German "Young Hegelians" include works by David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Subjects: Theology
Places: Great Britain