How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the WestReligious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. |
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... arguments in behalf of the principles of liberty of conscience, mutual tolerance, and religious coexistence and diversity. This literature was produced at a time when, as in the previous five centuries of Christian history, an ...
... argument, since they were very largely due to political expediency, which accepted them as lesser evils in preference to unending religious war. But what we cannot overlook is that both of these settlements were unstable, and neither ...
... arguments that can support and justify them. For in a certain sense ideas rule the world, and the attitudes and actions of human beings are greatly affected by reasons and justifications. In the absence of convincing reasons showing why ...
... arguments—and without the gradual acceptance by political and intellectual elites and others of principles and values enabling them to subordinate and set aside religious differences and strive for concord through mutual understanding ...
... argument of his political philosophy that the civil sovereign must be the sole judge of heresy.9 Etymologically, the word “heresy” originated in the Greek term hairesis, signifying “choice,” and it could also refer to opinions and the ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem | 46 |
The First Champion of Religious Toleration Sebastian Castellio | 93 |
The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands | 145 |
The Great English Toleration Controversy 16401660 | 188 |
John Locke and Pierre Bayle | 240 |
Conclusion The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After | 289 |
NOTES | 313 |
INDEX | 367 |