God in the Enlightenment ed. by William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram

Abstract

God in the Enlightenment. Edited by William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 322. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-19-026708-7.)The familiar image of the Enlightenment as an eighteenth-century movement to clear the way for secular liberal democracy by applying the acid of philosophical critique to the political and institutions of the Old Regime is alive and well. But for several decades it has come under increasing critical scrutiny, notably by historians working to delineate alternative, religious Enlightenments that afford religion a positive role in the genealogy of modernity.This collection of essays, drawn from a 2012 conference at Ohio University and introduced by co-editor William J. Bulman, advances that critical project. Lamenting that none of the and other recent scholarly alternatives to the rigidly secularizing, philosophical Enlightenment has proven compelling enough to replace it as a point of reference in the intractable and inappropriate (p. 31) current debate about the role of religion in public life, Bulman proposes defining the Enlightenment so as to encompass all those alternatives while holding a mirror to the debate itself. His Enlightenment denotes those who deliberated about public religion by employing the sacred and secular philological and historiographical practices characteristic of Renaissance humanism. In response to the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they aimed to establish order, stability, peace, and well-being (p. 18), articulating their views from the perspective of elite secularity: a common recognition, enabled by an influx of reports about the world's diversity, that their proposals needed to be acceptable to people of widely varying types and degrees of belief and unbelief' (p. 19). Familiar from Bulman's 2015 monograph Anglican Enlightenment, this Enlightenment is chronologically and ideologically extremely capacious. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century and can sustain a multitude of mutually exclusive epithets: tolerant and intolerant, authoritarian and democratic, liberal and conservative, pious and atheistic.Bulman's model finds mixed support in the volume's twelve other essays. On the one hand, although few contributors explicitly put its key concepts, causal mechanisms, and chronological boundaries to the test, most offer original and provocative investigations of authors who bear its hallmarks: intellectual indebtedness to the Renaissance and Reformation, and philological or historiographical engagement in debate outside the confines of academic philosophy and theology. On the other hand, some contributors characterize Enlightenment itself in ways that implicitly diverge from Bulman's.The least divergent are those who describe it neutrally, in terms of secular, rational, and philologically oriented discursive principles. …