onsdag, januari 11, 2012

Om modernitetens teologiska ursprung

“… the critique that Descartes and Hobbes undertake is in its origins and in most of its incarnations Christian. There can also be no doubt that Protestantism disenchants the world. However, again as we have seen, this disenchantment is not a form of secularization but a theological transformation within Christianity that imagines God as a deus absconditus. There is also no doubt that the separation of religion and politics that characterized the early modern period facilitated the humanists´ recovery of ancient republicanism, but, as we have seen, humanism was itself not unreligious or antireligious but an effort to recover a more authentic (if at times also more Pelagian) Christianity. 
[…]
The modern world certainly arises out of the Reformation and has a strongly Protestant character even when it seems most secular. Insofar as Protestantism always defined itself in terms of deus absconditus, secularism can be understood as merely one of its extreme forms. Indeed, even if our age is defined by the death of God and, as Nietzsche proclaimed, it is still defined theologically, even if only by a thoroughly negative theology.”



Michael Allen Gillespie, The theological origins of modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 226-227.

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