The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx

by Dominic Erdozain

Overview

It is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that entire industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, Dominic Erdozain argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself.

Revealing links between the radical Reformation and early modern philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, Erdozain demonstrates that the dynamism of the Enlightenment, including the very concept of "natural reason" espoused by philosophers such as Voltaire, was rooted in Christian ethics and spirituality. The final chapters explore similar themes in the era of Darwin and Marx, showing how moral revolt preceded and transcended the challenges of evolution and "scientific materialism" in the unseating of religious belief. The picture that emerges is not of a secular challenge to religious faith, but a series of theological insurrections against divisive accounts of Christian orthodoxy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199844616
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Dominic Erdozain is a visiting scholar at Emory University. His first book The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion was published in 2010.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction: Desecularizing Doubt

1. The Prophets Armed: Luther and the making and breaking of conscience
2. "To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine. It is to kill a man": the wars of religion and the virtues of doubt
3. The Metaphysics of Mercy: Calvin and Spinoza
4. In Search of a Father: Voltaire's Christian Enlightenment
5. "A damnable doctrine": Darwin and the soul of Victorian doubt
6. The God that Failed: Feuerbach, Marx, and the politics of salvation

Conclusion: in Augustine's shadow

Editorial Reviews

"a clear and lively counternarrative addressed to those who still believe religion can only restrain rather than liberate and that Christianity necessarily opposes what modernity values. For this audience, including many students as well as committed secularists with their own entrenched interpretations of the canonical figures Erdozain studies, this should be a valuable and important study." — Constance M. Fury, Journal of Religion

"Erdozain's book is a valuable revision of the history of unbelief, an implicit call for Christians to admit that our superiority complexes can fuel doubt, and an invitation for historians to examine not just the minds of their subjects but also their souls. Moreover, Erdozain is a brilliant stylist—each page contains turns of phrase that make this both convincing and enjoyable reading...[A] must read." —Daniel J. King, Fides et Historia

"Erdozain's study thus succeeds not as a nuanced account of theology's unpredictable significance (for that, readers should look to works like Schreiner's) but as a clear and lively counternarrative addressed to those who still believe religion can only restrain rather than liberate and that Christianity necessarily opposes what modernity values. For this audience, including many students as well as committed secularists with their own entrenched interpretations of the canonical figures Erdozain studies, this should be a valuable and important study."—Constance M. Furey, Journal of Religion

"It is rare to find an academic book which is such an active pleasure to read provocative and thoughtful."—Alec Ryrie, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

"The Soul of Doubt is a lively genealogy of the deconfessionalizing and secularizing of a religious conscience that never fully escapes its origins. Erdozain applies his brilliant prose to a wealth of primary sources to argue that the anti-religious fury of a figure such as Marx is an extension of the critical restoring and reforming impulse that can be traced back (at least) to Luther In this book, Erdozain has powerfully challenged the assumptions of both schools of thought by revealing the religiously rooted motivations of some of the most notoriously (supposedly) anti-Christian authors and the blurred lines between secular and religious thought between the 16th and 19th centuries. Needless to say, this argument has profound implications for contemporary narratives that either lament or celebrate a purported conflict between faith and reason and steady march of secularization."—Christopher D.L. Johnson, Religion

"It is a great merit of Dominic Erdozain's book that it provides an approachable and well-wrought account of the development of such pluralism over the past 500 years...Writing with great verve and passion, Erdozain is tireless in assembling texts and citations to support his various interpretations."—Times Literary Supplement

"The Soul of Doubt is a pleasure to read if you are at all interested in intellectual history, the roots and development of modern Western culture, and the role of religion, especially Christianity, in all that...This is a far-reaching and wide-ranging book that covers a lot of ground. Erdozain has shed new light, a new perspective, on modernity."—Patheos

"Compelling and absorbing reading. Judiciously researched and lucidly, often deliciously, argued, The Soul of Doubt is a 500-year sweep of elegant simplicity."—Christian Century

"Intriguing...This is an elegantly written, well-argued book. Highly recommended."—CHOICE

"This is the most important book on religious doubt in the modern West since Charles Taylor's A Secular Age." —Timothy Larsen, author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England

"The Problem of Pleasure established Erdozain as one of the most original and provocative new voices in modern Christian history, and specifically in the history of secularisation. This tour de force of incisive argument and wide-ranging erudition confirms his reputation. Others have suggested that the most powerful critiques of Christian orthodoxy have been primarily moral, indeed religious, but no-one has pursued this argument so consistently and across three centuries." —Hugh McLeod, author of The Religious Crisis of the 1960s

"This wide-ranging book offers a compelling account of the Christian roots of secularism. It skillfully blends intellectual history with the 'raw fuel' of human, historically-located lived experience, a force that Erdozain terms 'conscience.' The text sparkles with thought-provoking analogies and metaphors, and it establishes Erdozain's reputation as one of the most accomplished scholars of religion writing about the post-Reformation world." —Frances Knight, Associate Professor in the History of Modern Christianity, the University of Nottingham, UK

"Erdozain's argument is as relentless as it is well substantiated and unerringly illustrated."—Christian Century

"Erdozain's book accomplishes what good intellectual history should: it forces us to reconsider positions we had been taught to think were obvious." —Science, Religion, and Culture

"Erdozain executes his task with skill and verve. He possesses a delightful felicitous style that makes him a pleasure to read...an impressive performance, which should be considered required reading for anyone seeking a rounded understanding of religious belief and unbelief in the early modern and modern periods...the book is undoubtedly an outstanding achievement. ... Erdozain provides an invaluable-indeed indispensable-contribution to the rich and evolving tapestry that constitutes our historical reconstruction of the relationship between religion and secularism." —Reading Religion

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