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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... meaning of the term heretic, I can discover no more than this, that we regard those as heretics with whom we disagree. —Sebastian Castellio, Dehaereticis It is accordingly on this battlefield [of religion], almost solely, that the ...
... meaning of the concept of tolerance and its relation to religious freedom. The second chapter, on the Christian theory of persecution, deals with the evolution of the concept of heresy and the rationale that enabled Christians of high ...
... meaning “to nourish, sustain, or preserve.” Some philosophers and historians, taking the first of these meanings as their point of departure, regard toleration and religious freedom as quite distinct things and emphasize the differences ...
... meaning, as it would be conceived today. The struggle to achieve such toleration has the further significance, moreover, that its effects extend beyond the domain of religion and are closely connected with the broader goals of freedom ...
... meaning of a philosophical or religious sect or its tenets.11 Understood in this sense, it had no negative connotations in either language. The Greek term hairesis was also used in the New Testament, but here it had ceased to be a ...
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 |