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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... later on Islam. Early in its history, from the time of the apostles, it also became increasingly intolerant of heresy and heretics, those persons who, although worshipers of Christ, dissented from orthodox doctrine by maintaining and ...
... words liberté de conscience beginning to be used to oppose the forcing of consciences as a form of oppression.12 As we shall see later, moreover, the most noted early fighters for toleration, such as Sebastian Castellio, Roger 6 CHAPTER 1.
... later sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, frequent violations and local conflicts, as well as the exclusion in its provisions of toleration for Calvinism, undermined the Peace of Augsburg. Confessional enmity in ...
... later Protestant state churches, Christian governments, and religious persons could not have undertaken or approved of the repression of Christian heretics and dissenters. Because this theory was embraced by men of high moral character ...
... and church whom God would punish for their separation from the church's unity.18 Another polemic against heresy came from Tertullian, a rhetorician, lawyer, and leading Christian theologian of the later second and 20 CHAPTER 2.
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 |