Category: modernity

Dead Intellectuals, Fruitless Morals: Bavinck on a Fully Human Religion

by Joshua Shaw In the Prolegomena to his dogmatics Bavinck treats at various junctures the relationship between science and religion. In the eighth chapter of his work (“Religious Foundations”), he examines Science’s (in the sense of Wissenschaft) prerogative to judge religion according to its own standards, an endeavour he deems to have failed by the… Read More Dead Intellectuals, Fruitless Morals: Bavinck on a Fully Human Religion

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The Pagans and the Atheists in C. S. Lewis and Herman Bavinck

by Matthew Gaetano Joshua Shaw has been presenting Eusebius’s rich and complex polemic against paganism alongside his dialogue with Platonism. He has illuminated the reasons for the contrast between Eusebius’s approach and C. S. Lewis’s way of defending Christianity. Like many defenses of the Christian religion in the Renaissance and beyond (and in Late Antiquity… Read More The Pagans and the Atheists in C. S. Lewis and Herman Bavinck

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Voices Crying in the Wilderness – Moirans, Jaca, and Silva

by Matthew Gaetano Recent events have brought to mind the stories of the injustices and violence of the original encounters of Christians with native Americans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Dominicans Antonio de Montesinos (d. 1540) and Bartolomé de las Casas (d. 1566) spoke out against the unjust enslavement of these peoples, while… Read More Voices Crying in the Wilderness – Moirans, Jaca, and Silva

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Resurrection and History in Herman Bavinck

by Matthew Gaetano Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), a major Dutch Reformed theologian, professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, and author of the profoundly erudite Reformed Dogmatics in four volumes, gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1908-1909 academic year. He had already traveled to the United States to meet B. B. Warfield… Read More Resurrection and History in Herman Bavinck

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The Early Modern State, Religion, and Political Life

by Garrett Robinson “Heureux l’Empire / Qui suit ses lois!”[1] So goes one of the lines from one of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s lyrical tragedies exulting, in an only slightly indirect manner, the power of Louis XIV and his state. A later work echoes the same sentiment: “Chantons, chantons, la douceur de ses lois / Chantons, chantons, ses gloreiux… Read More The Early Modern State, Religion, and Political Life

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The Birth of the State and the Decline of the Common Good

by Garrett Robinson For previous entries in this series, see here and here. Throughout the latter Middle Ages, the city of Lyon would receive a visit from the king every year. During this visit, the citizens of Lyon would fête their king and bestow upon him gifts. In turn, the king, whether or not he needed or desired the gifts, recognized the privileges of the city.… Read More The Birth of the State and the Decline of the Common Good

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The Common Good before the Modern State

by Garrett Robinson Editorial Note: The Regensburg Forum seeks to be an actual forum where one can find different perspectives and ways of approaching topics within the long Augustinian tradition or within the history of Western Christianity. Garrett Robinson’s series of essays will be based upon his reflections on topics in political theology and philosophy… Read More The Common Good before the Modern State

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Book Reviews: Law, Freedom, Emotion, and Pilgrimage in Early Modern Christianity

by Ulrich L. Lehner Merio Scattola and Andreas Wagner, Prinzip und Prinzipienfrage in der Entwicklung des Modernen Naturrechts = The Question of Principles and the Development of Modern Natural Law (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: 2017), 336 pp. Merio Scattola, who died in 2015, belongs to the important historians of natural law, but is too little known outside… Read More Book Reviews: Law, Freedom, Emotion, and Pilgrimage in Early Modern Christianity

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Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and Catholic Traditionalism

by Matthew Gaetano Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the most important early German Romantics, deserves more attention from theologians today. I think that one of the reasons for the problematic shape of “modernity criticism” today is that we at times forget about the critics of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and others between the seventeenth and twentieth… Read More Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and Catholic Traditionalism

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Cocq vs. Hobbes on the Church and Ministry

by Matthew Gaetano Dutch Calvinist (discussed elsewhere at TRF) Gisbertus Cocq opposes Thomas Hobbes’s view of the Church and ministry in his Anatomy of Hobbesianism. In reply to Hobbes’s teaching that there are as many churches as there are Christian kingdoms or republics, Cocq says, “If there exist particular churches, there necessarily also exists a universal… Read More Cocq vs. Hobbes on the Church and Ministry

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