False Religion Research Articles

Ecumenical with the Truth?

The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ stance towards ecumenical and interfaith dialogue is an uncompromising one, regarding all manifestations of religion outside the Society as ‘false religion’ and part of Babylon the Great. The article discusses the history of Watch Tower Society’s stance towards Roman Catholicism, and to the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846. Under Rutherford’s leadership a new understanding of Christian apostasy and other faiths emerged, based on the Protestant writer Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons. The second part of the article turns to the present-day dialogue movement, arguing that the key Christian ecumenical themes of baptism, eucharist and ministry, are of no concern to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Interfaith dialogue involves harmful associations, and ecumenical and interfaith worship run counter to the Witnesses’ ways of worshipping God. Finally, attention is given to Hans Küng’s global ethic, which the Watch Tower Society contrasts with its own ‘global solution’ to the world’s problems.

The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.

Taming “The Tyranny of Priests”: Hume’s Advocacy of Religious Establishments

This paper aims to explain why David Hume supported the religious establishment despite his anti-clericalism. First, the Church of England could be regarded as a happy medium between two forms of false religion: superstition and enthusiasm. Second, Hume’s concern over “the tyranny of priests” led him to advocate a spiritual establishment bound to secular authority. Hume’s Erastianism does not contradict his opinion that civil magistrates should maintain impartiality in religious matters: both views reflect his thoroughly secular attitude towards religious institutions. Despite alleged differences between Hume and Adam Smith, they shared much common ground in their approach to religious institutions.

KARL BARTH AND ISLAM

AbstractKarl Barth comments briefly, sporadically and polemically on Islam as a false religion. He views it as a threat to Christendom, using it as a cipher for National Socialism, as an example of absolute monotheism, and finally as a “paganised” form of rabbinic Judaism. But an examination and critique of Barth's understanding of Judaism, which is central to his understanding of Islam, recognises the interdependency of Church and Synagogue for Barth. This article argues that this mutual dependency should also be extended to include Islam. While Barth never developed a theology of Islam per se, this new understanding gives his theology the potential to be of use to the new encounter between Christianity and Islam.

Profaning the American Religion: Flanery O'Connor's Wise Blood

Did you see the picture of Roy Roger's [sic] horse attending a church service in Pasadena'? I forget whether his name was Tex or Trigger but he was dressed fit to kill and looked like he was having a good time. He doubled the usual attendance. --Flannery O'Connor, in a 1952 letter is not an age of great Catholic theology, Flannery O'Connor wrote in 1958. We have very few thinkers to equal Barth and Tillich, perhaps none (Collected Works 1082). This is a notable admission, coming as it does from a devoutly Catholic novelist, and it suggests a great deal about her theological as well as her artistic values. For these Protestant theologians were relentless in their opposition to materialism and to the almost unequivocally demonic ideologies of capitalism (Barth, Church 531). O'Connor was no political radical, of course, but she had as little patience for her country's deifications of capital and consumption as for its essentially secular commodifications of Christianity. She must not, then, have had such Protestants as Barth and Tillich in mind when she spoke of directing the satire of her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), this Protestant world or against the society that reads the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalogue wrong (Collected Works 921). At any rate, the stubbornly materialist world depicted in Wise Blood looks not a little like the bleak world-picture Barth was fond of invoking in his sermons, with at its center modern capitalism, King Mammon, enveloping us in his claws and making us his sad and servants (Barth, Early 17). Wise Blood's world is replete with the icons, idols, and sacraments of Mammon, as well as with many examples of his beleaguered servants who revere, with a typically piety, the dogmas of consumption and the profit motive. One character, however, the protagonist Hazel Motes--and with him, the novel as a whole--adopts a far less reverent stance, in fact profaning these dogmas and sacraments at every turn. As Jon Lance Bacon rightly observes, in Wise Blood American religion [has] been appropriated by the 'salesman's world.' In the world of the novel, faith itself becomes a (39). Bacon and other scholars have ably demonstrated Wise Blood's pointed satire of consumer culture. Our concern here will be with O'Connor's framing of that social indictment--indeed her very construction of that indictment--in the often explicit registers of profanation: in the language and thematics of blasphemy, and in the material desecrations of sacrilege. For her indictments of capitalism and materialism, in other words, O'Connor drew on the language and traditions of irreverence in which she was well versed as a pious Catholic, turning them against the false religion she discovered all around her. Blasphemy is the only way to the truth, Hazel proclaims, and, far from the wholly unauthorized statement it may at first seem, in an oblique way it articulates the novel's own program of blaspheming modernity's capitalist gods (148). Even when Hazel and the novel both repudiate blasphemy (208), they emphatically do not reject profanation itself but rather turn away from blasphemy's inherently circumscribed discursive terrain as we shall see--to the more violent and vital recourses of material desecration. Having taken pains in Wise Blood to portray the sacral and even pseudo-Christian character of commodity capitalism, O'Connor proceeds to profane that capitalist faith at length, drawing on all the extreme and unsettling novelistic measures at her disposal. To read Wise Blood as profanation affords a third way between the practically Manichean positions that have characterized much O'Connor criticism to date: on one hand an often overtly conservative criticism that attends piously to the author's own theological aims, and on the other a revisionist, steadfastly secular strain that in stressing the more mischievous aspects of her fiction tends to undervalue or elide its religious investments. …

Ander weë tot God? Calvyn oor nie-Christelike godsdienste

Religious freedom is currently guaranteed by constitution in many countries. At the same time it has become a popular notion that no religion should claim to be the only true way to knowledge of God. In the sixteenth century Christianity was far less tolerant of aberrations and false religion. This study explores John Calvin’s views on the religion of Gentiles (paganism), Turks (Islam), and Jews (Judaism). Calvin refers to these religions not only in the consecutive editions of his Institutes, but also in a number of other writings. He asserts the uniqueness of Christ as the only Mediator and Redeemer for mankind on his unconditional acceptance of Holy Scriptures as the Word of God. As God created man in his own image with a distinct sensus divinitatis, the offer of true knowledge of God remains open to anyone.

Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (review)

Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia). Edited by Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro. (Brescia, Italy: Editrice Morcelliana. 2004. Pp. 411. euro28.00.) Daniele Menozzi, of the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, and Renato Moro, of the Universita degli studi Roma Tre, edited this worthy volume based on research and conferences at the University of Florence and at the University of Urbino's Romolo Murri Foundation. Given the book's concentration on the Spanish, French, and Italian experience, here mainly concerns its right-wing dimensions rather than its communist one. Nor does German Nazism figure much except in discussions of Mussolini's alliance -with Hitler. Nevertheless, given the enormous volume of recent work on how the Holy see or the German Catholic Church faced Nazi racism, Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo provides needed context and reminds us that Rome's response to interwar Latin totalitarianism was ambivalent. One question provoked by the book's title might be the choice of the word totalitarianism, a concept that touches every essay in one way or another. Among the central questions for historians of fascism are ones of definition; is fascism, for instance, or is totalitarianism? Such queries apply to this book. How totalitarian was Mussolini's state? Menozzi and Moro acknowledge difficulties with this term that, they note, the Church did not use until about 1938 (p. 374). Other concepts at work include secularization and, more important for the purposes of the book, what the Italians call statolatria or state worship .The essays in Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo mix Catholic elements into this stew. Many of the figures dealt with here ponder the idea of a universal state, often in efforts to reconcile the Church and Mussolini's regime, recalling both pagan and the Christian Roman Empire, medieval Christendom, modern Italian nationalism, and the Duce's resurrected empire in Africa. Menozzi and Moro group the collection into three sections. The first, titled Authority, deals with the Church and the new twentieth-century false religion of statolotria. Menozzi begins with a discussion of Pius XI's 1925 encyclical, Quas primas on the social kingdom of Christ and its interpretation as either a political call to arms or as a spiritual document. Quas primas occurs in many of the following studies. The next chapter, by Giovanni Vian, samples Italian bishops for their ideas on power and authority, concepts that they preferred over anarchy and mob rule. For them, Fascism offered solace and the Lateran Accords. Alfonso Botti concludes with a study of the Spanish Church and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and recalls the question here of whether or not he was, indeed, a totalitarian? Like the split over Quas primas, Botti finds diverse judgments on the regime, from (at times) suspicious Jesuits to more sympathetic Augustinians. …

The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy by Louise Bourdua (review)

REVIEWS 193 man East. She opens with a necessary review of intellectual construction of the Turk in the Middle Ages, focusing on crusader propaganda and courtly literature that developed a concept of the Turk as a religious foe, enemy of the true faith, the infidel who needed to be conquered in order to free the Holy Land for Christian rule and prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. Next, Bisaha moves forward chronologically to an analysis of individual writings by a number of sixteenth-century Italian humanists, who, steeped in the philosophy and natural paradigms of the ancients, eventually came to reject the medieval Christian tradition in favor of a view of Muslims (and Turks in particular) as barbarians, “others” utterly different from, and inferior in learning, civilization , and custom from the West. This chapter, which presents the core of Bisaha’s argument and is the most successful chapter, rescues an obscure aspect of humanist scholarship. The texts she discusses reinforce her argument that, although they made a living from their knowledge of the past, Italian humanists were very much aware of and engaged in the pressing political questions of their day. A more narrowly focused chapter follows, examining humanist responses to contemporary Greeks living under Turkish rule and showing that while some humanists portrayed contemporary Greeks as heirs to the learning and culture of the ancient Greeks and thus honorable, most described them as fallen from former greatness into ignorance. This section was the least compelling of the four, because it interrupts the development of the argument, woven into the rest of the work, that the humanists helped created a new idea of the west by writing about the east. Last, Bisaha turns to the problem of religion in the writings of the Italian humanists about the Turks. She examines the language used in a variety of tracts discussing the religious differences between Islam and Christianity . In so doing she reminds the reader that humanism is not synonymous with a completely secular or non-religious worldview; indeed, she does a remarkable job of proving that a sizable number of humanists in fact never divorced themselves from the medieval heritage that saw Islam’s followers as dangerous practitioners of a false religion. The book is not illustrated, but the reader might have benefited from inclusion of some of the pictorial representations of Turks and other Muslims that illustrated some of the later sixteenth and seventeenth-century humanist publications as well as other writings on geography and ethnography, such as world atlases and encyclopedias. Without moving the discussion out of the realm of textual analysis, such depictions would have given the reader a sense of how, literally, Turks were “pictured” by European educated elites, and perhaps how such engraved images in books reinforced or contradicted the humanist texts under discussion. In all, this is a fascinating work, utterly clear in its prose and solidly argued. It brings to light a forgotten aspect of the Italian humanist corpus , one that, as Bisaha convincingly shows, influenced the creation of the idea of “Europe” which would have such enormous impact in the colonial period and into the modern era. LAURA YORK, History, UCLA Louise Bourdua, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) 242 pp. REVIEWS 194 In The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy, Louise Bourdua investigates Franciscan attitudes and practices regarding art patronage from the mid-thirteenth century to the dawn of the fourteenth. Through detailed and cogent case studies of three important Franciscan churches (San Fermo Maggiore, Verona; San Lorenzo, Vicenza; and Sant’ Antonio, Padua), she examines issues of patronage, spirituality, and production. Bourdua’s central argument is that Franciscan art patronage in the later Middle Ages was governed primarily by local aesthetics and processes of patronage, not the dictates of the mother church at Assisi. This book’s greatest strength lies in its synthesis of Franciscan ideals and life, documentary evidence, and the art and architecture itself. Although the title suggests that the work covers the entirety of the Italian peninsula, the reader should bear in mind that the study focuses almost exclusively on the Veneto. The case studies are...

Calvin and other religions: research

Widely differing views on ways leading to true knowledge of God is at present characteristic of discussions in the sphere of religion. Although Calvin worked in a completely different scene, he has laid down certain principles based on his interpretation of Holy Scripture that may contribute to current theological thought on this issue. In this article his views on true and false religion, non-Christian faiths, the uniqueness of Christ as Mediator and Redeemer, and universalism is discussed from the perspective not only of his Institutes, but also of his Commentaries, Tracts and Treatises and Letters. His conviction is that careful observation of God's Word leads to the principle of Christ as the only way to God. Any kind of self-invented religion, even though it is the result of an appeal by God's general revelation on the sensus divinitatis in mankind, leads to idolatry. Acta Theologica Vol.24(1) 2004: 147-167

The Making of Modern "Mysticism"

Mysticism, as a category long prominent in the study of religion, has been widely critiqued over the last quarter century for its essentialist illusions. That critical literature, while based on historicist convictions, has rarely extended such historical vision to the liberal religious culture that produced the modern construct. This article bridges the vast gap between Michel de Certeau's genealogy of mysticism focused on seventeenthcentury France and the accounts of those scholars who focus on the boom of academic studies at the turn of the twentieth century. It presents the emergence of mysticism as a category in Anglo-American discourse from its development during the English Enlightenment within critiques of false religion to its Romantic remaking within Transcendentalist Unitarian circles in the United States. In taking seriously the religious and intellectual worlds that produced William James's theorizing, the article opens wider perspectives on why the construct came to carry so much weight in both the study and the practice of religion.

Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments

ICONOCLASM in the OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS Peter Goldman Westminster State College ofSalt Lake City Acentral problem for any monotheistic religion is distinguishing worship of the one true God from idolatry in all its forms. René Girard's pioneering interpretation ofthe Judeo-Christian scriptures clarifies this distinction by recourse to an ethical conception ofthe sacrificial: False religion or idolatry is essentially sacrificial, while the Judeo-Christian tradition opposes the sacrificial in all its myriad forms. As Girard explains, the Passion narrative makes clear that the sacrificial or scapegoat victim, Christ, is innocent. The violence inflicted upon Christ is human, not divine. The Gospels thus reveal the violence that hides behind the sacred. Religious practices that further sacrificial violence are idolatrous, worshiping violence in the guise ofthe sacred.1 The ethical simplicity of the Girardian distinction between true faith and idolatry is complicated, however, by the issue of representation. According to the Old Testament, the one true God cannot be represented by images or figures of any kind, while idols typically take figurai form. From a biblical perspective, therefore, the question ofform is central to an understanding of idolatry. The Old Testament ban on images has never been investigated from a Girardian perspective. In this essay I apply Rene Girard's anthropological insights to the subject oficonoclasm in the Old and New Testaments. More specifically I address the second command-ment, the famous ban on "graven images," and the problem of representing God. From the per- ' For a fuller treatment ofGirard's interpretation ofChristianity in relation to the sacrificial, see his Things Hidden since the Foundation ofthe World 84Peter Goldman spective ofGirard's "fundamental anthropology" there are two basic issues in this regard. The first is the ethical function of the ban on images; how does the second commandment function ethically to preserve the human community in the Bible? Second, is the ban on images sacrificial as understood in Girardian terms? Or is it anti-sacrificial and therefore ethically progressive? The second commandment reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth : Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" (KJV, Exod. 20.4-5). At first glance, this commandment might appear as an expression ofthe most primitive form ofreligious taboo. A specific cultural activity is arbitrarily forbidden under threat of punishment . The taboo on images, unlike the law against murder for example, has no obvious moral dimension. Images of any kind must be violently expelled —sacrificed, as it were—for no immediate reason. According to the second commandment, any attempt to represent God or his creation by images is a profane violation of his "jealous" nature; the second commandment therefore often finds expression in the violent destruction ofsocalled idolatrous images. Acts oficonoclasm directed againstthe images of foreign gods are quite common in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I argue here thatthe second commandment is in practical terms ethically progressive and anti-sacrificial. It actually questions and underminesthe whole sacred-profane dichotomy. Indeed, the ban on images is ultimately a secularizing influence crucial for the development of modernity. I also address the Christian acceptance of divine images, which has often been understood as a reversal of the Judaic ban on figurai representations . In the interpretation of iconoclasm that I am proposing here, however, the image ofChrist on the cross can be seen as a logical development of the second commandment rather than its contradiction. I. The second commandment in context In the Old Testament, the giving of the second commandment is associated with the Exodus from Egypt and the Hebrew rejection of Egyptian religion and culture. In Herbert Schneidau's book Sacred Discontent, he argues persuasively that Hebrew monotheism is first of all a reaction against pagan polytheism. Schneidau writes, "The JudeoChristian tradition defines itselfas opposed to a pagan world which it sees Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments85 as essentialIy mythological"(12). Further, "TheHebrews habitually defined themselves negatively, by their differences from their neighbors" (51). Schneidau explains: We find...

The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Bible, of all books, is most dangerous one, one has been endowed with power to kill, writes Mieke Bal.1 Like many striking aphorisms, this statement is not quite true. Some other books, notably Qur'an, are surely as lethal, and in any case, to coin a phrase, books don't kill people. But Professor Bal has a point nonetheless. When it became clear terrorists of September 11, 2001, saw or imagined their grievances in religious terms, any reader of Bible should have had a flash of recognition. The Muslim extremists drew their inspiration from Qur'an rather than Bible, but both Scriptures draw from same wellsprings of ancient Near Eastern religion. While it is true both Bible and Qur'an admit of various readings and emphases, and terrorist hermeneutics can be seen as a case of devil citing Scripture for his purpose, it is also true devil does not have to work very hard to find biblical precedents for legitimation of violence. Many people in modern world suspect there is an intrinsic link between violence and what Jan Assmann has called the Mosaic distinction between true and false religion,2 or even between violence and monotheism or monolatry.3 Such claims are, no doubt, too simple. Violence and sacred went hand in hand long before rise of Akhenaten or Moses, and polytheism can be used to legitimate violence just as easily as monotheism.4 But it is biblical monotheism has dominated Western world for last two thousand years, and it is Bible concerns us here. At a time when Western world is supposedly engaged in a war on terrorism, it may be opportune to reflect on ways in which Bible appears to endorse and bless recourse to violence, and to ask what implications may be for task of biblical interpretation. Violence, of course, has many forms. On a broad level, it has been defined as the attempt of an individual or group to impose its will on others through any nonverbal, verbal, or physical means inflict psychological or physical injury.5 Often term is reserved for coercion or force is illegitimate, and is associated with social disorder, although states and governments routinely use forceful and coercive methods to impose order.6 For present, I will restrict myself to most obvious, even crude, forms of violence-the killing of others without benefit of judicial procedure. is important to bear in mind, however, line between actual killing and verbal, symbolic, or imaginary violence is thin and permeable. The threat of violence is a method of forceful coercion, even if no blood is actually shed. I. The herem or Ban is a warrior, says Song of Moses (Exod 15:3), in one of earliest attempts to characterize God of Israel.7 Many of oldest hymns in praise of this god celebrate the triumphs of Lord (..., Judg 5:11). It is as good as certain, wrote Gerhard von Rad, that concept of faith-in other words, confident trusting in action of Yahweh-had its actual origin in holy war, and from there it took on its own peculiar dynamic.8 Even if we regard von Rad's statement as exaggerated, it is certainly true YHWH's putative power in battle was a major consideration in early Israelite worship.9 Moreover, Israelites were expected to come to help of Lord in battle and were subject to sanctions if they did not, as can be seen from cursing of Meroz in Song of Deborah (Judg 5:23). Only in much later times would power of deity be taken as a reason for quietism on part of human worshipers.10 The violence associated with worship of YHWH in antiquity is most vividly illustrated by herem, or ban, practice whereby defeated enemy was devoted to destruction.11 The practice was not peculiar to Israel. …

‘Lying Histories Fayning False Miracles’: Magic, Miracles and Mediaeval History in Reformation Polemic

Miracles, which had been a common feature of late mediaeval piety and devotional literature, were a favoured target of evangelical polemicists in the sixteenth century. Protestant history writers sought to expose as frauds, deceptions and diabolic wonders, the miracles associated with the heroes of mediaeval Catholicism, and with key elements of traditional theology. The false miracle, it was argued, was not an innocuous deception, but rather an indication of the power of the devil and his agents within the Roman church. The search for such feigned wonders and legerdemaines became a crucial part of the separation of personalities of the past into adherents of true and false religion, and the re-evaluation of the miracles of the mediaeval church was to be vital in the shaping of a historical identity for the nascent Protestant church in the sixteenth century.

'A species of false religion': William Robertson, Catholic relief and the myth of Moderate tolerance

'A species of false religion': William Robertson, Catholic relief and the myth of Moderate tolerance

Signs, Idols, and the Incarnation in Augustinian Metaphysics

Augustine had no theory of signs . Indeed, one might properly say that Augustine had no philosophy of representation, no critique of idolatry, and no theory of time. This is not to say that Augustine did not think about language, or that in doing so he did not incur debts to earlier essays on the nature and origin of signs. Rather, Augustine confronted signs and the failings of language, and sought to explain the referential capacity of religious art, in response to contingencies that were, for him, embedded in philosophical and theological debates. These debates are now the subject of discrete modern discourses whose presuppositions Augustine would reject. The objects of Augustine’s inquiry, and of modern inquiry into Augustine, are rarely the same. In the Ž rst years of the Ž fth century church and state moved with ever greater resolve against the remnants of Greco-Roman paganism, and Augustine as bishop cooperated in the policies of the institutions that ordered his world. That he did so should not, however, allow the philosophical basis of his critique of pagan idols and classical texts to remain unexplored. For Augustine, if pagan culture were to be wrong, it had to be wrong for a reason. Challenged in daily converse and by daily experience to explain his distinction between true and false religion and true and false religious practice, Augustine ultimately argued that signs served diVerent functions in pagan and Christian life because pagans and Christians sought access to aspects of creation that possessed diVerential ontological statuses and that had, therefore, diVerent places in late classical metaphysics. But by casting a religious debate in shared philosophical language, Augustine had somewhat uneasily to describe a problemof religious faith in intellectual terms. Again and again, the pursuit of signs and idols led him to a fact for which traditional metaphysics could not account and that traditional language could not describe, the fact of Christ. It was an impasse that Augustine broke by an argumentative sleight of hand: it was the truth of the incarnation, he insisted, that revealed the deŽ ciencies of classical metaphysics and the frailty of human language. If Augustine confronted the metaphysics of representation in order to solve a religious problem through reason, signs them-

Signs, Idols, and the Incarnation in Augustinian Metaphysics

Augustine had no theory of signs . Indeed, one might properly say that Augustine had no philosophy of representation, no critique of idolatry, and no theory of time. This is not to say that Augustine did not think about language, or that in doing so he did not incur debts to earlier essays on the nature and origin of signs. Rather, Augustine confronted signs and the failings of language, and sought to explain the referential capacity of religious art, in response to contingencies that were, for him, embedded in philosophical and theological debates. These debates are now the subject of discrete modern discourses whose presuppositions Augustine would reject. The objects of Augustine’s inquiry, and of modern inquiry into Augustine, are rarely the same. In the Ž rst years of the Ž fth century church and state moved with ever greater resolve against the remnants of Greco-Roman paganism, and Augustine as bishop cooperated in the policies of the institutions that ordered his world. That he did so should not, however, allow the philosophical basis of his critique of pagan idols and classical texts to remain unexplored. For Augustine, if pagan culture were to be wrong, it had to be wrong for a reason. Challenged in daily converse and by daily experience to explain his distinction between true and false religion and true and false religious practice, Augustine ultimately argued that signs served diVerent functions in pagan and Christian life because pagans and Christians sought access to aspects of creation that possessed diVerential ontological statuses and that had, therefore, diVerent places in late classical metaphysics. But by casting a religious debate in shared philosophical language, Augustine had somewhat uneasily to describe a problemof religious faith in intellectual terms. Again and again, the pursuit of signs and idols led him to a fact for which traditional metaphysics could not account and that traditional language could not describe, the fact of Christ. It was an impasse that Augustine broke by an argumentative sleight of hand: it was the truth of the incarnation, he insisted, that revealed the deŽ ciencies of classical metaphysics and the frailty of human language. If Augustine confronted the metaphysics of representation in order to solve a religious problem through reason, signs them-

Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience From Wesley to James

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ForumFull AccessFits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience From Wesley to JamesSAXBY PRIDMORE, M.D., SAXBY PRIDMORESearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Hobart, Tasmania, AustraliaPublished Online:1 Sep 2000https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.9.1537AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Fits, Trances, and Visions is a history of religion, predominantly in the United States, from around 1740 to around 1910. In the introduction, Ann Taves describes periods of being uncertain of her aim in writing the book and some changes in direction. This comes through; it is long and meandering and very detailed, and the style is ponderous, which makes it user unfriendly.The title, Fits, Trances, and Visions, is engaging, especially to psychiatrists, but, from the psychiatric perspective, there is almost no phenomenology. Taves uses involuntary experiences, “enthusiasm, mesmeric states, and the subconscious,” as the path by which to reveal the thinking and actions of religious, psychological, and medical professionals over the centuries.This manuscript by a highly credentialed religious scholar would be riveting for a student of religion but is of less pressing interest for the psychiatrist, as would be expected. It contains a host of interesting material, however. For example, Taves reveals that the term “enthusiasm” (a favorite of mine) was coined as recently as the seventeenth century and is derived from the Greek en theos, meaning to be filled with or inspired by a deity. It came into use to describe attacks of “false religion,” which included calling out, falling down, visions, and other behaviors during religious ceremonies. This pejorative term was employed by those of different religious persuasions out of concern for social order (and, perhaps, loss of members).There is much of interest concerning Mesmer and those who used his animal magnetism for religious, medical, and secular purposes. This led to Spiritualism, which claimed a common ground between science and religion.Taves states that “Anglo-American neurologists, intent on establishing themselves as a recognized subspecialty within the medical profession, attacked Spiritualism in a largely successful bid to secure a secular understanding of trance as a foundation for their own neurological science.” Whether this accurately reflects the motivation of the neurologists of the day is unclear; however, Taves points out that “their learned talk about hysteria…was derided in the papers,” which has the ring of truth.There are two mentions of the DSM: one in the introduction and the other in the conclusion. The author concludes that enthusiasm, mesmeric states, and the subconscious are parallel constructs, and most psychiatric readers could feel comfortable with this conclusion. This is a book for religious college libraries. It has a place in psychiatric libraries where there is a particular interest in related areas.By Ann Taves. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1999, 448 pp., $65.00; $22.95 (paper). FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 157Issue 9 September 2000Pages 1537-1537 Metrics History Published online 1 September 2000 Published in print 1 September 2000

The Importance of being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity

Calvinist reformers expected secular authorities to champion religious reform. Preachers presented kings and princes with ideals of godly rule drawn from the history of biblical Israel-an aspect of the Hebraic patriotism that was pursued with much enthusiasm by early modern Calvinists-to encourage magistrates to lead the implementation of reform programs. Many Calvinists found the life of King Josiah to be an excellent model for contemporary magistrates: Josiah as religious reformer, as iconoclast and destroyer of false religions, and as territorial expansionist. Calvinist writers also noted the prophecy of Josiah's violent death, which exemplified the fate believed to await those princes who failed to cooperate completely with projects of religious reform and social renewal. The importance to Calvinist rulers of being Josiah therefore reveals much about the political and cultural identity of Reformed Protestants across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Late Elizabethan Protestantism, Colonialism, and the Fear of the Apocalypse

The influence of Protestant interpretations of the Bible and readings of European history on the development of English colonial thought and practice has not often received significant attention. In this essay I argue that the millennia! reading of the Apocalypse inscribed in the Geneva Bible (1560), an interpretation that appeared to receivehistorical validity after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in France (1572), had a huge impact on the writings of colonial propagandists. Writers such as M. M. S. (the translator of Bartolome de Las Casas), Richard Hakluyt, Richard Beacon, and Samuel Purchas, all argued for the importance of an English colonial presence in the Americas in terms of a struggle between the true religion of the Protestants and the false religion of the Catholic Antichrist. Beacon's Machiavellianinspired analysis of Ireland regards that country as a land torn between the two faiths and argues that lack of English vigilance could lead to violence as destructive as that unleashed on Protestants in France in the 1570s. Purchas's collection of travel writings revises Hakluyt's nationalistic focus in favour of travel as a religious allegory, thus exploding the tension between nation and faith implicit in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.

AN ORTHODOX EMBRACE OF GENTILES? INTERFAITH TOLERANCE IN THE THOUGHT OF S. D. LUZZATTO AND E. BENAMOZEGH

Ever since the beginning of the Enlightenment there has been a markedly tolerant shift in the philosophical and ethical stance of Jews and Judaism toward non-Jews and their religions. This is certainly true in the social sphere, in the political conceptualization of the liberal society, and in the extension of ethical commitments to non-Jews.1 But this has generally been considered typical mostly of liberal Jewish thought and in opposition to Orthodox philosophical and halakhic constructs. The details of philosophical and ethical positions in this matter, however, yield some surprising results. Although in the practical realm there is a considerable degree of acceptance of Gentiles among liberal Jewish philosophers of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, there is also a significant effort, especially in Germany, to articulate the supremacy of Judaism over all other faiths. Among some philosophers there has even been a perpetuation, at least on a philosophical level, of the need to destroy false religions.2 For example, Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of ethical monotheism and the ethical treatment of the stranger, also states,