Saving Knowledge

Peter Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment ) argues that there was an epochal change in the understanding of Christianity during the seventeenth century. Over the protests of such puritans as Robert Harris and Richard Baxter, who argued for what Harris called “true religion in the old way ” of faith and love, English writers increasingly attempted “to encapsulate in propositional form the essence of ‘the Christian Religion,’ ‘the Protestant Religion,’ the true Catholic Religion,’ or just simply ‘Religion.’” He provides a small survey of these efforts:

“In 1658 . . . another edition of Thomas Rogers’ English Creed appeared, bearing the title The Faith, Doctrin and Religion Professed in this Realme of England . This commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles presents the faith, doctrine and religion of England as articles ‘analised into Propositions.’ The new title of this work is indicative of the new status of credal statements. In 1585, its original title had been simply The English Creed . In the seventeenth century, however, is was no longer merely ‘the English Creed,’ but the sum total of the faith, doctrine and religion of England. In the same year (1658), Calvinist tract writer Richard Younge published his Short and Sure Way to Grace and Salvation . Younge set out ‘three fundamental principles of Christian Religion’ as a minimal statement of what should be believed. If ‘well learned,’ Mr. Younge earnestly declares, these three principles ‘would keep millions out of Hell that blindly throng thither.’ Almost thirty years later, attempts of this sort culminated in Nicholas Gibbon’s Theology Real, and Truly Scientifical . Here the ambitious Gibbon set forth the sum of the Christian religion in a ‘scheme or diagram’ which occupied a single printed page [the shadow of Ramus here?]. Literally hundreds of seventeenth-century works, most of them dating from the time of the Westminster Assembly, claim similarly to present the sum, the substance, the ground, the body, or the system of ‘the Christian Religion.’ Almost without exception, they present as the substance of Christianity articles of belief.”

One is tempted to shout a protest “against Christianity,” so understood.