Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion

Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion PDF Author: Michiel R. Wielema
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004214585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This book is the first English edition of a major critique of organized religion. A rational plea for tolerance and free thought, Adriaan Koerbagh's A Light Shining in Dark Places (1668) demolishes the authority of the Christian revelation and the churches.

Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion

Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion PDF Author: Michiel R. Wielema
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004214585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This book is the first English edition of a major critique of organized religion. A rational plea for tolerance and free thought, Adriaan Koerbagh's A Light Shining in Dark Places (1668) demolishes the authority of the Christian revelation and the churches.

Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion

Adriaan Koerbagh, A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion PDF Author: Adriaan Koerbagh
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004212361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
This book is the first English edition of a major critique of organized religion. A rational plea for tolerance and free thought, Adriaan Koerbagh's A Light Shining in Dark Places (1668) demolishes the authority of the Christian revelation and the churches.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 PDF Author: Jetze Touber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192527185
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated. Jetze Touber expertly charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism to determine if Spinoza's work on the Bible had bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should handle Scripture. Spinoza has received considerable attention both in and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly during the past decades. So has that of fellow 'radicals' (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, and enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. Touber counteracts this perspective and considers how the Dutch Republic used biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. In doing so, Touber takes into account the highly neglected area of the Dutch Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The study concludes that Spinoza—rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity—acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly at all times, on all levels.

The Radical Enlightenment in Germany

The Radical Enlightenment in Germany PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004362215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
This volume investigates the impact of Radical Enlightenment thought on German culture during the eighteenth century. It takes recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure and debates the precise nature of Enlightenment.

The Sovereign and the Prophets

The Sovereign and the Prophets PDF Author: Atsuko Fukuoka
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004351922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Tracing Old Testament topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, Atsuko Fukuoka recontextualizes Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise and clarifies its historical import for Dutch debates on religion, state power, and liberty.

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age PDF Author: Henk Nellen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192529811
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This authoritative volume looks at biblical criticism as an innovative force and as the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The contributors show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God's Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined, and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

Eleusis and Enlightenment

Eleusis and Enlightenment PDF Author: Ferdinand Saumarez Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004692304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

A Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency, Containing a Defence of the Treatise De Cive of the Learned Mr Hobbes

A Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency, Containing a Defence of the Treatise De Cive of the Learned Mr Hobbes PDF Author: Lambert van Velthuysen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900422565X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency (1651) by Lambert van Velthuysen deduces the nature of virtue and vice and the right to punish crimes from the Hobbesian principle of self-preservation.

Sparks of Reason

Sparks of Reason PDF Author: Ruben Buys
Publisher: Uitgeverij Verloren
ISBN: 9087045158
Category : Netherlands
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Throughout the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, the Low Countries were home to a vibrant tradition of lay philosophy in Dutch. 'Sparks of reason' takes a detailed look at this philosophical tradition, with a special focus on the sixteenth century. During this turbulent century, several authors, such as Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert (1522-1590) and Hendrik Laurensz Spiegel (1549-1612), developed an ethics which was founded on rationality and self-motivation. This 'vernacular rationalism' was a dynamic melting pot of classical philosophy, vernacular humanism, intellectual spiritualism and popular piety. As this book shows, vernacular rationalism was rooted in an age-old Netherlandish tradition and was to be-come one of the breeding grounds for the early Enlightenment in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Its point of departure was the inherent goodness of humankind and the possibility of moral growth through rational knowledge. Its goal was perfect happiness.

Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic

Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic PDF Author: Marina Montesano
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039289594
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Witchcraft and magic are topics of enduring interest for many reasons. The main one lies in their extraordinary interdisciplinarity: anthropologists, folklorists, historians, and more have contributed to build a body of work of extreme variety and consistence. Of course, this also means that the subjects themselves are not easy to assess. In a very general way, we can define witchcraft as a supernatural means to cause harm, death, or misfortune, while magic also belongs to the field of supernatural, or at least esoteric knowledge, but can be used to less dangerous effects (e.g., divination and astrology). In Western civilization, however, the witch hunt has set a very peculiar perspective in which diabolical witchcraft, the invention of the Sabbat, the persecution of many thousands of (mostly) female and (sometimes) male presumed witches gave way to a phenomenon that is fundamentally different from traditional witchcraft. This Special Issue of Religions dedicated to Witchcraft, Demonology, and Magic features nine articles that deal with four different regions of Europe (England, Germany, Hungary, and Italy) between Late Medieval and Modern times in different contexts and social milieus. Far from pretending to offer a complete picture, they focus on some topics that are central to the research in those fields and fit well in the current “cumulative concept of Western witchcraft” that rules out all mono-causality theories, investigating a plurality of causes.