Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Both the moderate Enlightenment and a radical or revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophers such as Voltaire depicted organized religion as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification.
Between 1740 and 1789, the Enlightenment acquired its name and, despite heated conflicts between the philosophes and state and religious authorities, gained support in the highest reaches of government. Although philosophe is a French word, the Enlightenment was distinctly cosmopolitan; philosophes could be found from Philadelphia to Saint ...
As the more radical implications of the scientific and cultural influences of the Enlightenment began to be felt in the Protestant churches, especially in the 19th century, Liberal Christianity, exemplified especially by numerous theologians in Germany in the 19th century, sought to bring the churches alongside of the broad revolution that modernism represented.
In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras, Europe was a "persecuting society" which did not tolerate religious minorities or atheism. [4] Even in France, where the Edict of Nantes had been issued in 1598, then revoked in 1685, there was very little support for religious toleration at the beginning of the eighteenth century. [5]
The advantage of giving a standard definition of 'Deism' is to distinguish it from Christianity on the one hand and atheism on the other hand. Robert Corfe argues since deism is not organized as a church, and because it teaches self-reliance and to question authority through its intrinsic characteristics, it has little inclination to move toward the status of a highly organized body.
Storm points out that there are vastly different and mutually contradictory periodizations of the Enlightenment depending on nation, field of study, and school of thought; that the term and category of "Enlightenment" referring to the Scientific Revolution was actually applied after the fact; that the Enlightenment did not see an increase in ...
Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not take hold until the Germans "rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by ...
The major figures of the Great Awakening, such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Dickinson, and Samuel Davies, were moderate evangelicals who preached a pietistic form of Calvinism heavily influenced by the Puritan tradition, which held that religion was not only an intellectual exercise but also had to be felt ...