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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... to despise and traduce but to torture and murder those who do not share their view. Not only that but those who affirm their faith in the existence of what is nominally the same supernatural being have been as viciously divided PREFACE ...
... faith, were regarded by the Catholic Church or Christian governments not as religious traitors or schismatics, but as infidels and external religious enemies, and were therefore often officially tolerated under various disabilities and ...
... Faith of apostolic origin summarizing the divinely ordained events leading to redemption through Christ, contributed to the establishment of orthodoxy.16 Speaking of this period, Gibbon declares that the Christians formed a numerous and ...
... faith in opposition to Arianism and other heresies. Several of Constantine's heirs permitted the toleration of ... faith . . . communicated by the Apostle Peter to the Romans” and to “believe only in one deity consisting of the sacred ...
... faith against heretics. The practical toleration and religious pluralism that had formerly been the Roman custom no longer existed. The change that took place is epitomized in an appeal made in 384 by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus— a Roman ...
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 |