[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

[C. G. Estabrook]

If we take Luther and Erasmus as paradigmatic figures of the Reformation and 
Enlightenment, respectively, (and that can probably be pressed only so far), 
there's certainly a sort of sibling rivalry. But Erasmus thought he was renewing 
that tradition by publishing the Patristic texts that had been ignored, and 
Luther thought he was rescuing the church from the heresy it had fallen into 
(Pelagianism) with a novel theological anthropology.  The Enlightenment figure 
is the conservative, the Reformation one is the radical...

And of course you're right about materialism and theism.  Christianity's 
Ur-heresy was (and remains) Gnosticism, an anti-materialism.  --CGE

Chris Doss wrote:
> Well, it seems to me that the Reformation and Enlightenment are not so much
> in a parent-child relationship as they are brother and sister (cf. Luther and
> Erasmus, Correspondence Between). Both were reactions to what they saw as an
> ossified and perverted tradition and turned away from the institutions of
> that tradition (and both went way too far in the process).
> 
> I mean, look at Hobbes. He was both what we would think of as a
> Fundamentalist and what we would think of as a precursor to the modern
> scientific worldview (I'm tempted to get into a digression on how materialism
> and theism do not contradict each other, but am not going to).
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ---- From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
> 
> Our hermeneutic took a strange turn with the rise of capitalism. The
> interaction was surely complex. An aspect of the process is set out in a
> brilliant recent book by James Simpson, Burning to Read: English
> Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Harvard UP 2007) - “a landmark
> in the study of fundamentalism. In James Simpson's radical reassessment, the
> Protestant Reformation appears not as a parent of the Enlightenment, but
> rather as a progenitor of the extreme and intolerant literalism that has
> seized every major world religion today” (Amitav Ghosh).
> 
> 
> 
> 
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