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A Historian's Approach to Theology

Theology's Role in History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Willis B. Glover
Willis B. Glover
Affiliation:
Mercer University
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Extract

Basil Willey in the introductory chapter of his Seventeenth Century Background calls attention to the fact that the rise of scientific humanism introduced a basic dichotomy into the intellectual and religious life of that century. A new pattern of explanation came to dominate Western thought in the seventeenth century, and it was destined to continue without being effectively challenged until the twentieth. For three centuries it was assumed that reality was a closed system of law, and no explanation was satisfactory which did not make clear the efficient causation operating within this closed system. Epistemological studies, to be sure, developed within this period a radical skepticism regarding the validity of man's knowledge of ultimate reality; but not even Hume or Kant succeeded in conceiving of reality as essentially dynamic. The early nineteenth century witnessed a reaction against the static rationalism of the previous age. Emphasis came to be put on movement, development, evolution. Things were explained, not by direct relation to a nexus of fixed laws, but by descriptions of how they came to be.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1956 , pp. 291 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1956

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References

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