Abstract
This study contends that many of modernity’s searching critiques of Christian religion can and must be rightly understood to have their mainsprings from within Christianity itself. More specifically, it proposes that tensions internal to Christianity—between the cool rigidities of public confessional orthodoxy fused with political establishment on the one hand, and dogmatically relaxed but morally conscientious faith rooted in internal spiritual experience on the other—play themselves out repeatedly (if variously) in the work of many leading modern critics. The story of modern doubt is less a story of the acids of modern science inevitably corroding outmoded religious faith as it is the consequence of passionate Christian morality repeatedly scandalised by experiences of intolerance and violent persecution born of the coupling of over-confident Christian orthodoxy and anxious political authority.
Concise discussions of Luther and Calvin illustrate how ‘Protestantism was born in unblushing contradiction’ (p. 32) as both produce and perform the ‘paradox of violent faith’ (p. 68), unleashing evangelical reform only to tether it to the re-enforcement of public order, confessional orthodoxy and the theologically rationalised violent persecution of ‘heretics’. Moving chronologically from the 16th through to the 19th century, the book sets forth a series of engaging portraits of exemplary figures in context. Exposition of the unsurprisingly religious character of the passionate spiritual protests against intolerance by figures like Franck, Castellio, the Dutch Collegiants, and English Quakers and Levellers, secures crucial insights into recurrent pattern of critique on the basis of which Erdozain then extends his argument to discern something of the same moral and spiritual passion in the work of Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, and then even in Huxley, Eliot, Feuerbach and Marx. Time and again, piety becomes eloquently sceptical of the ‘power of doctrine’ when faced with the outworkings of the ‘doctrine of power’ in the suppression of dissent. Across the piece, Erdozain wants us to register how consistently doubt appears as a reflex of spiritually shaped moral repugnance at religiously rationalised persecution. A remark cited from Frances Newman—Cardinal Newman’s brother—might be offered as a rubric over the whole: ‘Oh, Dogma! Dogma! how dost thou trample under foot love, truth, conscience, justice!’ (p. 199).
Detailed, careful, and written close to its sources, the book is also well-paced and beautifully written. While composed as a single overarching argument, readers could well access any one of the chapters—e.g., the particularly rich discussions of Spinoza or Voltaire—discretely with understanding. Erdozain’s fine study makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing scholarly task of rendering the story of the modern fate of religion generally, and of Christian faith in particular, as nuanced and complex as reality requires.