A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe produced two apparently contrary but actually deeply entangled movements, both of which were destined to affect a world far beyond their original settings in countries around the North Sea. The Enlightenment bred an open scepticism as to whether there can be definitive truths in specially privileged writings exempt from detached analysis, or whether any one religion has the last word against any other; in its optimism, commitment to progress and steadily more material, secularizing character, it represented a revulsion against Augustine of Hippo’s proclamation of original sin. Yet beside the Enlightenment, the series of Protestant awakenings drew their inspiration from that same Augustine and from his interpretation in the Reformation. The mainstream Reformers had not merely proclaimed original sin as the key problem for humanity, capable of being solved only by a gracious God, but in their proclamation, they affirmed the authority and transcendence of the biblical text and jettisoned a whole raft of creative allegorical ways in which its meaning might be extended. It is possible to read the Protestant awakenings as a shocked reaction to the social and intellectual innovations of the early Enlightenment.