Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 1-27

3. Imagining Enlightenment: The Historical and Historiographical Context

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 29-67

4. Overture to a Moral Messiah: God, Goodness, and the Heretical Tendency

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 69-124

5. Material Messiah: Hobbes, Heresy, and a Kingdom Not of This World

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 125-180

6. ‘No Spirit, No God’: From the Light of Christ to the Age of Enlightenment

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 181-242

7. What Would Jesus Tolerate? Reason and Revelation in Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 243-293

8. The Unity of God and the Wisdom of Christ: The Religious Enlightenments of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 295-353

9. Postscript and Conclusion

   • Jonathan C. P. Birch

   Pages 355-374

10. Back Matter

    Pages 375-493

    PDF

This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacyof the Enlightenment at its best.  

• Thomas Hobbes
• Thomas Jefferson
• Enlightenment thinkers
• moral-theological realism
• natural law ethic
• Arianism
• Pelagianism
• Marcionism

“This is an England-centred book, complementing rather than replacing other histories and standard works … . It lends itself to dipping into for leads worth following and could provoke less open minds to reflect on the permanent value of the counter-tradition in Western Christianity which supposes that morals are more important than theological truth.” (Robert Morgan, Modern Believing, Vol. 64 (2), 2023)

“Birch’s invaluable, rigorous, and engaging book does much to further—it will be of vital interest to historians, theologians, and religious studies scholars of all levels, seeking to engage honestly with the complex, pluralistic nature of our collective intellectual history.” (Jonathan Greenaway, Literature and Theology, February 7, 2021)

“With this important contribution, Jonathan Birch takes his place in the growing field of Enlightenment studies. By shedding new light on the significance of Jesus for seminal figures in the period, Birch pluralizes and unsettles our notions of what the Enlightenment was and, indeed, what it means today.” (Michael C. Legaspi, Pennsylvania State University, USA)

“This book is complex, timely, and its ambitions bold. A well written and deeply researched work, Birch masters a number of historiographies and scholarly discourses to provide an account of how developments in critical method combined to deliver an enlightened Jesus. This will be necessary reading for historians of Enlightenment ideas, and the history of theology and biblical criticism.” (Justin Champion, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

 

• School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

  Jonathan C. P. Birch

Jonathan C P Birch teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is an intellectual historian who specialises in biblical interpretation and Western philosophy.

Policies and ethics