Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

Ses s i on 3: Modern i t y , Pos t -Modern i t y , and the Chur ch Today 61

2. Numerous controversies among Lutherans: e.g., George Calixtus accused of “syncretism” (who simply insisted that nothing was required of all Christians except what was believed in the first five centuries)

3. Reformed debate, polarization: the declarations of heresy and expulsions

a. Synod of Dort (1618-1619)

b. Westminster Confession (1647)

C. Major reactions to strict, intolerant, vicious orthodoxies

1. Rationalism gains new ground as the major alternative to religious bigotry:

Such conflict hastened a scientific versus a religious critique of Scripture: Biblical criticism began to move emotionally outside the limits of church controversy after the disaster and devastation of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in England. Scholars became disgusted at the seeming hairsplitting disputes about the meaning of Scripture which had, they thought, led to such bloody conflicts. Philosophers like Benedict Spinoza (1632–77) and John Locke (1632–1704) argued that a detached reading of the Bible as a book like any other book, which paid due attention to the original language and historical circumstances, would produce a tolerant and peaceful agreement about the essentials of a moral and spiritual religion.

~ David Noel Freedman. The Anchor Bible Dictionary . New York: Doubleday, 1996, c1992, S. 1:727.

2. Non-rationalistic approaches to intolerance

a. Quakerism: George Fox (ca. 1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends , or “Quakers,” 1652. Converted in 1646, traveled much spreading views in England,