Scripture and Toleration between Reformation and Enlightenment

  • John Coffey
Chapter

Abstract

That recent years have witnessed a resurgence of historical scholarship on religious toleration is hardly surprising. Rarely has the subject seemed so relevant or so pressing. Of course, earlier historians were equally convinced that it mattered in their own time. W. K. Jordan published his four-volume history of The Development of Toleration in England under the growing shadow of fascism in the 1930s, and it was designed as an apologia for fragile liberal values.1 The Jesuit Joseph Leder’s great work Histoire de la Tolérance au Siècle de la Réforme (1955) appeared in the midst of Catholic debates over church—state relations that culminated in the Second Vatican Council landmark Declaration on Religious Freedom.2 But twenty-first-century anxieties over religion and politics have injected a new sense of urgency into what might otherwise be a quiet backwater of historical enquiry. While the clash between Islamic militants and the West has caused many to revisit the Crusades and the history of Muslim—Christian interaction, public intellectuals have been equally inclined to turn to the early modern era. This is perhaps most marked in the US, where controversies over church and state are routinely rooted in the eighteenth century. Here the Religious Right fights the secular Left over the Founding Fathers as Protestants and Catholics once fought over Augustine.

Keywords

Religious Freedom Sacred Text Political Thought Philosophical Commentary Religious Toleration 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Wilbur K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932–1940).Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    The English translation appeared five years later: Joseph Leder, S. J., Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1960).Google Scholar
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© John Coffey 2014

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