I. INTRODUCTION#
From the late sixteenth century until deep into the eighteenth century, a number of scholars periodically picked up intellectual cudgels and sparred with each other over a key question: What constitutes the authority or warrant for establishing the “truth” of a matter?
In the 1690s a specific literary “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns” broke out in the Académie française in Paris. Nicolas Boileau and Jean Racine, partisans of the authority and writing styles of the “Ancients”, disputed with Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a proponent of “modern” (Cartesian) scholarship.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an earlier “modern” and “utopian” of sorts, advocated an inductive, “experimental philosophy.” Moreover, he called for the removal of so-called “Idols of the Mind” — bad habits in the way we customarily think. These habits distort and hinder our understanding of the world as it is.
Bacon downplayed the authority of classical authors by claiming that the Greeks, for example, had speculated too much in philosophy and had only a “narrow and meager knowledge” of history and geography. A true philosopher should not be held captive to the writings of antiquity that could “break and corrupt” the study of a more important subject: nature.
Likewise, René Descartes (1596–1650), a pioneer in modern philosophy, was especially blunt in his criticism of the Ancients.
In The Passions of the Soul (1649) he rejected the value of their teachings: “What the ancients have taught is so scanty and for the most part so lacking in credibility that I may not hope for any kind of approach toward truth except by rejecting all the paths which they have followed.”
By contrast, Descartes had argued in his Principles of Philosophy (1644) that we “must believe everything which God has revealed, even though it may be beyond our grasp.”
Both Moderns and Ancients generally professed respect for the Bible, an ancient authority, or they acknowledged that Europeans customarily esteemed scriptural authority.
II. DOING SOMEONE’S ELSE WILL#
In classical culture the Latin word for authority, autoritas, had as one of its definitions “will, pleasure, decision, bidding, command, precept, decree.”
Many seventeenth-century scholars would have understood this classical definition as reflective of a major characteristic of their own times. People lived in hierarchical, usually nonegalitarian societies in which they were obliged to yield obedience to the authority of “superiors,” that is, to their “will, decision, bidding, command, precept, and decree.”
Even in the United Provinces, where citizens enjoyed significant liberties, an oligarchy of wealthy burghers nonetheless expected to receive due respect and honor for their high station in society.
In general, the personal liberties of Europeans were often restricted except in republics, in free cities, in high society and libertine circles, in the criminal underworld, among illicit book printers and sellers, and in corners of Europe where the policing abilities of authorities were limited or nonexistent. In the United Provinces a measure of toleration created breathing space for Mennonites and other Anabaptists, various Christian dissenters and heterodox thinkers, Unitarians, and Jewish refugees from Spain, Portugal, and other countries.
In kingdoms, however, speaking or writing too critically about the king, a noble, or a religious leader or saying something detrimental to the Christian religion could sometimes trigger a duel, an arbitrary arrest, prison time, or even an execution. Politics and religion were often organically united.
The codes of Justinian and Theodosius as well as the Imperial Constitutions appeared to support this kind of argument.
A. The Web of Hierarchical Relations#
In certain lands the “people” were frequently enmeshed in a complex web of hierarchical relations in which they were legally bound subjects to “superior” powers. They were subject to:
The sovereign authority of the king or tsar
The teaching and demands of the clergy
The orders of the king’s or tsar’s officers, lawyers, tax collectors, and soldiers
The commands of a feudal lord, a noble, a corporation, a guild, or the owner of a business
In the late seventeenth century, an obscenity sworn against Louis XIV was punishable by death. Authorities feared the power of words. Words could be dangerous, they could inflame riots and revolts. Many Europeans had serious restraints placed on their actions and words by repressive, authoritarian governments of the “Old Order,” or the Ancien régime, that essentially ended in 1789 (with the outbreak of the French Revolution).
B. The Three Estates#
Especially in certain kingdoms, the European populace continued to remain divided not so much by class distinctions as by orders or estates. In France, for example
The First Estate consisted of the clergy, ranging from prestigious prelates like the archbishop of Paris to an impoverished country curé in Ardèche.
The Second Estate consisted of the nobility, ranging from wealthy princes of blood (princes du sang) to poor nobles with little land.
The Third Estate consisted of those who were left, what we might call “the people” (or more negatively, the “mob,” or “rabble”) — that is, townspeople ranging from a wealthy “bourgeois” man or woman in Paris to a peasant in Provence.
These divisions provided a structural framework for a hierarchical society. The dividing lines between the estates were sometimes quite hardened; sometimes they could be porous.
Wealthy people from the Third Estate could be ennobled if they paid enough money for an office of a noble, or nobles could likewise become members of the clergy by taking holy orders.
The overwhelming majority of Europeans lived in rural areas and were frequently quite poor. Likewise, many city dwellers experienced grinding poverty. Conditions among “the poor” could vary, however. A peasant in France might possess a relatively higher standard of living than did a serf in poverty-ridden areas of eastern Europe.
C. The Authority of Divine Right Kings#
In the hierarchical world of kingdoms, a king or queen enjoyed an unequaled privileged position, claiming as they often did a “supreme” authority over nobles, the people, and sometimes the clergy. In various regions of Europe the monarch’s religion constituted the established faith of a particular kingdom.
Even the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire often viewed himself as a divine right monarch who overlooked a monarchia and answered to God alone.
On occasion, the princes and kings of the empire yielded unquestioned obedience to him as if he were a divine right monarch.
On other occasions they claimed their autonomous rights to make their own laws and policies.
The officials of governments of the Free Cities of the Empire, attempting to protect their liberties, also had equivocal political relations with the emperor.
In 1562 John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury, published An Apology of the Church of England, a landmark book in the history of the English monarchy. Citing the Bible’s authority, Jewel defended the legitimacy of the Elizabethan church’s break from Rome. For Jewel, teachings of the Old Testament in particular provided a warrant for the theory of divine right monarchy. This theory in various versions enjoyed an especially prominent role in the political life of such realms as England, France, Denmark, and Sweden and in smaller principalities.
James I (1566–1625), the future king of England, fashioned a sturdy defense of the divine right of kings in two books, Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599). James criticized what he thought were the antimonarchical notes of one version of the Geneva Bible. He claimed that these notes were “partial, untrue, seditious, and favouring too much of dangerous and trayterous conceits.”
Other advocates of divine right monarchy were somewhat less presumptuous in their claims, but often they made a similar point: the authority of kings comes directly from God. It is not mediated to them through the people.
The Spaniard Francisco Suárez, a learned Jesuit theologian, argued that if a people have formed a political society and have chosen a king to lead them, they also have the right to revolt against and kill the king if he acts in a tyrannical manner. Suárez defended this position in his Defense of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of the Anglican Sect (1613).
England’s James I, a staunch defender of a conservative divine right theory, ordered the hangman to burn the book, established the “severest penalties” for anyone who dared read it, and denounced Suárez as “a declared enemy of the throne and majesty of kings.”
Several more restrained versions of divine right theory — for example, the influential exposition of the doctrine by Claude de Seyssel in his The Monarchy of France (1515) — stipulated that a Christian monarchy was to be tempered, paternal, and limited by the “fundamental laws” and the rights of the Parlement.
The Christian king had a responsibility to take care of his people the way a loving father cares for his own children.
The king was to respect their rights and not take advantage of them.
In 1579 the Reformed theologian Theodore Beza of Geneva published Psalmorum sacrorum libri quinque (Sacred Psalms, Book 5), a book intended to give guidance to French princes on how to rule righteously. According to the Reformer, David’s authority was “limited by specific laws and conditions.”
In emulation of King David, the Christian king was anointed with holy oil at his coronation. Through this ceremony he became priestly and semidivine. The Christian king, in serving God, had specific functions to fulfill.
As a Christian warrior, he was to lead his soldiers in battle for the Christian religion.
In fulfilling his priestly function, a Christian king had the responsibility periodically to “touch” his subjects afflicted with scrofula, a glandular disease (“the king’s evil”).
In 1775 Louis XVI as a Roi thaumaturge — “king of miracles” — did so as well, much to the disgust of several nobles present at the “healing” ceremony. The practice continued in France unto the 1820s. As late as 1714, English kings participated in these “healing” ceremonies.
In principle, a Christian king was not to act as a despot or a tyrant in the manner of a Turkish sultan or an autocratic Russian tsar. He was to act as a caring Christian father. In grateful appreciation, the king’s subjects were to love and venerate His Majesty.
Another pillar buttressing the king’s authority consisted of venerable traditions about the history and origins of the royal family. These traditions stretched deep into the past to Clovis (466–511), the “first Christian king” for the French, or Cerdic (c. 464–534), ancestor to kings of Wessex for the English. According to a general theme of these historical/mythological reconstructions, a number of tribal leaders yielded obedience to one of their more powerful warrior competitors in exchange for his protection.
D. Louis XIV and “Absolute Monarchy”#
French King Louis XIV (reign, 1661–1715) is often singled out as an example, par excellence, of an “absolute monarch.”
During the Fronde, rebellious Parlements agitated by ambitious nobles had challenged the monarchy’s authority. The story goes that a young Louis, fearing for his life as an heir to the throne, went into hiding. He was obliged to bed in straw in Saint Germain, so desperate and uncertain was his personal safety. He witnessed with trepidation the political chaos accompanying the failed Fronde.
With the inception of his personal rule, Louis XIV proceeded to tame the rebellious nobles by wooing, cajoling, and threatening them. He was also very skillful in self-advertisement. Louis XIV grandiosely claimed, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state, it is I”).
Using poets such as the tragedian Pierre Corneille, baroque painters such as Charles Le Brun, architects such as Jules Hardouin-Mansart, and finance ministers such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and seconded by renowned clerics such as Bossuet, the Sun King glorified his own person and deeds and spelled out his divine right “absolutist” designs to both his own people and foreign governments.
Not to be outdone, a number of Austrians compared their Emperor Leopold I (reign, 1658–1705), Louis XIV’s principal European competitor, to Emperor Constantine and the god Apollo. Moreover, Leopold’s eldest son, Joseph I (reign, 1705–11), upon his election as King of the Romans in 1690, was extolled as a “new sun,” an apparent slap at Louis XIV’s notorious vanity.
From the pretensions of King James I to the pronouncements of Louis XIV, from Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings (1680; the target of John Locke’s criticisms) to Bossuet’s Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (1697, 1709), various versions of divine right theory circulated through the seventeenth century.
Declarations by monarchs could give the impression they perceived their rule as “absolute.” In point of fact, these same monarchs often realized that their actual exercise of power was constrained by certain realities:
the ideology of divine right kingship often placed on them a responsibility to care for their people
the kings sometimes did not have sufficient funds and policing capabilities to enforce royal laws
the kings had to deal with warring factions among their nobles (including princes), fractious parliaments, treacherous intrigues at their courts, and recalcitrant provincial assemblies, in addition to the challenges of foreign powers
the kings could not ignore the fact that if they pursued economic or social policies deemed harsh, urban and peasant revolts might ignite
members of the Roman Catholic clergy on occasion appealed to be tried by their church’s ecclesiastical court systems rather than submit to trial in the kings’ courts
Sometimes the clergy claimed ecclesiastical exemptions from royal decrees or local governmental orders. A number of factors could hobble the kings’ capacity to act in an arbitrary or “absolutist” fashion.
III. FORMS OF GOVERNMENT: MONARCHY, ARISTOCRACY, AND DEMOCRACY#
Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), who attended the Westminster Assembly as a representative of the Scottish Church, described three principal varieties of government:
By one person — monarchy
By some chief leading men — aristocracy
By the people — democracy
Within the same century, a country such as England experienced different types of governments:
Divine right monarchies with absolutist pretensions, namely, the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49)
A republican “commonwealth” (1649–60) with Oliver Cromwell (d. 1658) as Lord Protector and with chiliastic Fifth Monarchy men, Levelers and Diggers, calling for radical reforms
The Restoration monarchies with renewed absolutist pretensions, the reigns of Charles II (1660–85) and James II (1685–89)
Ultimately, the Glorious Revolution (1689) thwarted James II’s attempt to establish Roman Catholicism as the religion of the land and to harness Parliament’s ability to make laws
Eventually a constitutional monarchy was reinstituted that invested Parliament with important powers. A mixed form of government, this constitutionalism was part monarchy, part representative democracy.
Likewise, the cantons and dominions of Switzerland manifested diverse forms of government.
Neuchâtel was governed by autocratic rulers
Berne, Fribourg, Solothurn, and Lucerne by an aristocracy of nobles
The forest cantons of Schwyz and Uri by democratic elements
Much farther east in Muscovy, tsarist autocracy emerged. On January 16, 1547, the first “Tsar of all Russians,” Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1530–84) was crowned. The autocracy associated with the tsars had different traits from those of a number of monarchies in the West. All subjects owed absolute obedience to the tsar, a sacrosanct figure.
Thus politicians and rulers advocated or upheld different types of government across the wide expanse of Europe in the 1600s. These governments ranged from “free cities” to princedoms and kingdoms to city-states and the Papal States in Italy, to the federated republic of the United Provinces, to various forms of “absolute monarchies” such as in France, to magnate noble families exercising extensive control over lands in Poland, to a monarchical Holy Roman Empire in Germany, to a tsarist autocracy in Russia.
A. Republics: Nurseries of Revolt?#
Republics (or kingless states) and republican-like monarchies with parliamentary constitutions, which assured some personal freedoms, stood out as particularly troublesome foils for absolute monarchies in the seventeenth century.
Proponents of divine right monarchy often feared that those who extolled the virtues of republics sheltered potentially seditious and traitorous sentiments and were prone to foment revolt. They believed that Holy Scripture stipulates divine right kingship; it does not approve of republics. It disallows subjects from dissenting from and rebelling against their monarchs. For anyone to justify the legitimacy of a republic or a limited monarchy, they would have to furnish persuasive scriptural warrants.
A number of John Calvin’s followers believed that the Reformer and others offered robust arguments that did this. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion (Book IV), Calvin wrote, “We know from Holy Scripture that the Lord wished this perverse and cruel tyrant [Nebuchadnezzar] to be honored and obeyed and implicitly for no other reason than he ruled over the kingdom.… It is clear beyond a doubt that we owe obedience to the person set in authority over us.” But then Calvin cited a major exception to his general rule. If kings ordered something “contrary to God’s will, it should be disregarded. The dignity of their high office must not be taken into account in such cases.” That is, Christians have no obligation to obey a ruler if he asks them to worship God in a manner contrary to their consciences informed by Holy Scripture.
French Huguenots and other Calvinists living under Roman Catholic monarchies on occasion took a stance similar to Calvin’s. They claimed that the king had no more loyal subjects than they. But for conscience’ sake, they would not accept the king’s dictates if he attempted to force them to worship God in accord with his Roman Catholic religion.
After the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre decimated especially the class of nobles among Huguenots in the fall of 1572, Theodore Beza apparently penned Response to an Address Presented Recently at the Helvetian Council (1573, under the name Wolfgang Prisbach) as an opening volley in a “resistance literature” aimed at Roman Catholic accounts justifying the massacre. François Hotman wrote a similar work, Discours simple & véritable (1573). Hotman’s Francogallia (1573) and Beza’s The Right of Magistrates (1574) especially stirred the hot coals of controversy. Roman Catholic apologists vehemently denounced the “resistance literature.” They often charged Calvinism with a republican spirit and a spirit of revolt.
This kind of gnawing fear also contributed to James I’s decision to back his Anglican bishops rather than a Puritan party at the beginning of his reign. To royalists, this fear seemed amply justified as Puritans and Independents of various stripes took up arms against Charles I in the English Civil War.
To some Roman Catholic critics, Protestants of whatever stripe were not only heretics but politically subversive. The execution of Charles I (1649) allegedly by “Calvinists” reinforced the dark suspicions of Roman Catholic monarchs that Calvinists in particular were dangerous covert republicans. This worry haunted the thinking of Louis XIV. It apparently contributed to his decision to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
B. The Jansenists and Authority#
Potential opposition to divine right theory also issued from quite a different religious quarter: the Jansenists.
These Augustinian Catholics constituted a distinct minority group within the Roman Catholic Church.
They firmly believed they represented the true Catholic Church.
They portrayed themselves as loyal monarchists.
Nonetheless, their insistence on the right to worship God as they saw fit, not in the way the king or the Jesuits — their fierce opponents — stipulated, rendered them suspect.
They too appeared to endorse an ecclesiology with subversive entailments for absolute monarchs.
Some embraced concilarism and forms of Gallicanism (see chapter 12) that ostensibly challenged especially the authority of the pope. During the “Peace of the Church” (1668–69), the Jansenists enjoyed a brief respite of toleration. Thereafter, Louis XIV’s government sought to weaken and eventually crush the movement.
IV. SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION AS AUTHORITIES#
The Latin word autoritas could also mean, besides authority, “the things that serve for the verification or establishing of a fact.”
As the seventeenth century began, the Bible remained the most authoritative book in Western civilization. The authority of Scripture stemmed from the authority of its ultimate author, God himself. Whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, Europeans generally revered the Bible as the inspired written revelation from God. It tells the gospel story of humankind’s redemption from sin through Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection. Christians meditated on Holy Scripture in personal and household devotions and recited it in liturgies.
Proponents of divine right kingship cited Holy Scripture to justify their political theory. By contrast, so-called Fifth Monarchist writers such as William Aspinwall likewise appealed to Scripture to justify the removal of Charles I, a divine right monarch.
Fifth Monarchists believed they were playing a role in ushering in a “Faith Monarchy” in which King Jesus would rule.
At the beginning of the century many natural philosophers (“scientists”) believed that the validity of their investigations could be rendered suspect if their findings did not accord with biblical teaching.
Biblical chronologists such as Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) drew up “sacred theories of the earth” that charted the history of the world since creation.
Some map-makers continued to place Jerusalem at the center of the world.
Preachers and priests warned and comforted their parishioners with the teachings of the Bible. Christian polemicists attempted to clinch arguments by citing scriptural passages.
In sum, the Bible represented one of the central authorities of the West that Europeans claimed to justify their own ways of viewing the world. As God’s Word, it was truthful in all that it affirms regarding matters of faith and practice as well as details of history, the natural world, and other areas of human concern.
A. Roman Catholic Tradition#
Leading representatives for the various Christian communions, however, did not necessarily weigh or appropriate the authority of Scripture in quite the same way.
Roman Catholic theologians asked a number of pertinent questions.
Although the Bible is authoritative, they said, does it tell us all we need to know about our salvation?
Did not the Council of Trent declare that from divine revelation flow two authoritative sources: Holy Scripture and apostolic Tradition?
Are not some elements about how we are saved absent in Holy Scripture but supplied in “apostolic” Catholic Tradition?
Have not Protestants downplayed or denied the indispensable role of the mass in obtaining our salvation?
The Jesuit Robert Bellarmine summarized succinctly a major distinction between Protestants and Roman Catholics on this point:
The controversy between the heretics [Protestants] and ourselves focuses here on two points: first, when we affirm that the Scriptures do not contain the totality of necessary doctrine, for faith as well as for morals; then when we say that apart from the Word of God written, it is necessary to have his non-written Word, that is to say, divine and apostolic traditions.
By contrast, Protestants claimed that the Bible itself is a “sufficient rule for faith and practice,” that is, it tells us all we need to know about our salvation and more. In his influential book Disputations on Holy Scripture (1588), William Whitaker, a Cambridge professor admired as one of Protestantism’s most astute apologists, wrote
We say that the scriptures are a rule, because they contain all things necessary to faith and salvation, and more things may be found in them than absolute necessity requires. We do not attach so strict and precise a notion to the term ‘rule’ as to make it contain nothing but what is necessary.
The Bible, therefore, was considered a judge or rule of traditions, whether Protestant or Catholic. These traditions, helpful as some of them were, remained man-made and fallible. In consequence, they could be reformed. Even conciliar statements of the early church could be reformed.
B. Protestant Confessions and Scripture’s Authority#
Protestant confessions reiterated these same perspectives. Many Protestants, however, did evidence great respect for the creeds of the early church and the beliefs of the early church fathers.
A number of the Protestant confessions acknowledge the great value of the creeds of the early church. For example, the “Epitome of the Article” of the Formula of Concord (adopted in 1577) reads:
And inasmuch as immediately after the times of the Apostles, nay, even while they were yet alive, false teachers and heretics arose, against whom in the primitive Church symbols were composed, that is to say, brief and explicit confessions, which contained the unanimous consent of the Catholic Christian faith, and the confession of the orthodox and true Church (such as the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian Creeds): we publicly profess that we embrace them, and reject all heresies and all dogmas which have ever been brought into the Church of God contrary to their decision.
Protestants believed that these particular creeds, reformable though they were, reflected the teachings of Holy Scripture and thus served as rules by which heresies could be judged. Moreover, the Protestant confessions often took on great authority for them, and for the same reason: these confessions were thought to mirror directly the teachings of Holy Scripture.
C. The Authority of Editions of Scripture#
Roman Catholics and Protestants differed regarding which edition of the Bible constituted the infallible Word of God.
The Council of Trent (fourth session, April 8, 1546) stipulated that Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the “authentic” text.
Protestants generally replied that the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible were the Word of God.
Historian Richard Muller observes that orthodox Protestant theologians, whether Reformed or Lutheran, sometimes did distinguish between:
The infallible autographa of Scripture, the original manuscripts that had perished.
The apographa, “original and authentic” extant texts in Greek and Hebrew.
These latter texts were also deemed as “infallible,” any errors being those of copyists. Thus, some Protestants believed that the apographa of Scripture had as much authority as the autographa.
In the wake of Erasmus’s appeal for vernacular versions and the influential example of very successful translations of the Bible by William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, and Luther, Protestant scholars continued to create new editions of the Bible in vernacular languages.
A number of Protestant scholars such as Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Niels Hemmingsen at the University of Copenhagen, and the renowned Josephus Justus Scaliger at the University of Leiden, along with scholars at Cambridge University and other schools, pursued biblical studies regarding exegetical methods and forms of lower textual criticism, or what became known as Critica sacra.
Some Roman Catholic biblical scholars engaged in lower textual criticism as well. Periodically, they found themselves in an uncomfortable quandary. Their own studies in Hebrew and Greek texts suggested that the Vulgate itself could be profitably revised, a project the papacy eventually approved.
In 1582 English Roman Catholics in exile published the Rheims New Testament based on the Vulgate.
In 1590 the Vulgate of Sixtus V (1521–90) was published. This proved to be a flawed edition. It was corrected by the so-called Clementine Vulgate of Clement VIII in 1592.
In 1609–10 the English Rheims New Testament (1582) was joined to the just completed Douay Version of the Old Testament.
The combined two testaments became the basis for the widely accepted Rheims-Douay Roman Catholic version of the Bible.
D. The Struggle over the Interpretation of Scripture#
Yet another issue divided Protestants and Roman Catholics concerning the Bible’s authority. What real authority, Roman Catholics asked, could the Bible possess if it were not interpreted properly? This kind of question became a cornerstone for Roman Catholic apologists.
In the 1560s Juan Maldonat (1533–85), a Jesuit teaching in Paris, raised skeptical arguments about the ability of Protestants to determine and interpret their own rule of faith, Holy Scripture, without the help of the Roman Catholic Church and its Tradition.
Another Jesuit, François Veron (1575–1649), developed a veritable “war machine” of skeptical arguments with which to try to overwhelm Protestants. In debates with French Reformed pastors, he claimed that Protestants, owing to the fact they did not accept Catholic Tradition, were bound to fall into skepticism due to their private interpretations of the Bible.
According to Veron, the results of this interpretative license were disastrous. Protestants simply could not agree on the interpretation of many biblical passages. This explains why so many Protestant groups existed, each claiming that its particular beliefs and distinctives had scriptural grounding. And if there are so many different interpretations, will not a person fall into skepticism if he or she cannot discern which one represents true biblical teaching?
For many Roman Catholic apologists, the proper approach to biblical interpretation was to accept by faith what the papal magisterium relying on church Tradition taught is the correct interpretation of a biblical text. After all, the church is infallible.
Protestants were quick to offer a rejoinder to these lines of arguments. Were not a number of interpretations proposed by the popes and bishops patently in error? Protestants proposed that they followed more sound principles of interpretation: Let infallible Scripture interpret infallible Scripture; let doctrine interpret doctrine (the “analogy of faith” - analogia fidei); let the more clear passages of Scripture clarify the meaning of the more obscure passages. For that matter, the Bible is self-authenticating.
These kinds of arguments and counterarguments stamped polemical debates over Scripture and Tradition. In these debates, the nature of the church’s authority emerged as a key consideration in weighing the authority of both Scripture and Tradition.
Both Roman Catholics and Protestants believed that the teachings of the true church had authority. Nonetheless, they disagreed thoroughly regarding which was the true church, what were the marks (notae) of the true church, and what was the weight of the true church’s authority vis-à-vis Holy Scripture.
E. The Authority of the Church#
For Roman Catholics of that time, unity constituted one of the most decisive marks identifying the true church. According to Scripture, there is one true faith and one true church. Roman Catholic apologists believed the visible Roman Catholic Church exhibited unity; therefore it possessed the prerequisite mark identifying it as the true church. This Roman Catholic claim echoed through polemical discussions of the seventeenth century.
The argument helped persuade a number of Protestant notables such as the Marshal Turenne in France to convert to Roman Catholicism. Moreover, some Catholic apologists also claimed that the Bishop of Rome, the pope, was infallible when he spoke about faith and morals. In his teaching office he could pronounce which interpretation of Scripture is the correct one and which tradition represents apostolic orthodox doctrine. Some apologists added the further claim that the Roman Catholic Church determines and authenticates what is true Scripture.
Protestants also believed there are marks identifying the true church as the body of Christ. They too valued unity, but many believed this true unity is found in the catholic, or universal, invisible church of Christ, not in the visible Roman Catholic Church. Those who belong to the true church of Jesus Christ are the sheep who hear their Master’s voice.
For many Protestants, the marks of the true church include the faithful preaching of the gospel and the faithful administration of the ordinances. In this regard, individual churches are “more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them” (Westminster Confession 25:4). Because Christ is the head of the church, the pope cannot possibly be such.
For Protestants in Geneva, it was the Reformed pastor who had the responsibility and authority to offer Christian consolation, instruction, and discipline through regular home visitations and the preaching ministry to the laity.
V. THE INCREASED AUTHORITY OF “SCIENCE”#
Even though many seventeenth-century “natural philosophers” were eclectic and dabbled in the occult and alchemy, they participated in a modern “scientific revolution.”
Historians often present this revolution as one of the most important developments in world history.
A. The Scientific Revolution#
The general duration of the revolution ostensibly ran from Copernicus (1473–1543) through Isaac Newton (1642–1727), although scientists such as Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), author of Celestial Mechanics, believed they were contributors to the same revolution.
This revolution sometimes overthrew existing cosmologies, especially traditional views of astronomy based on Aristotle, Ptolemy, and a certain reading of the Old Testament. It challenged the premise that the earth, an inert and immobile body, is at the center of the universe and is circled by a series of planets.
A number of traits characterized this “scientific revolution”:
1. From Isolation to Community#
In the days of Copernicus, natural philosophers (or scientists) generally worked in relative isolation from other scholars. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, naturalists impacted by Renaissance humanism and caught up in the “science of describing” species developed a greater sense of working in community across religious and national divides. The number of known species jumped from 500 in 1550 to 4,000 by the 1620s
By the time of Newton, scientists could avail themselves of the benefits of collective associations made up of like-minded scholars. The meetings, publications, and correspondence between members of learned societies such as the Royal Society (1660 to the present) or the Paris Academy of Sciences (1663–1803) promoted an expansive exchange of ideas.
2. From Organism to Machine#
In earlier centuries, it was commonplace for scholars to view the world as a divine, living organism sometimes described as possessing feminine traits (“mother nature,” for example). The world was not easily susceptible to description in mathematical terms. Some believed in a “Great Chain of Being” linking all things. Many reputable thinkers thought astrology provided them with a profound understanding of this world.
With the scientific revolution, a number of scientists, referring to the world, changed the metaphor from a living organism to a machine. As a machine, Kepler said, the world is susceptible to mathematical description and follows fixed laws.
3. From Natural Law to Divine Revelation#
As the emerging parlance of natural “laws” became more common, so eventually did the definition of a miracle as a contravention or violation of a natural law.
Natural philosophers thought they gave the truth claims of the Christian religion a boost when they indicated “impartially” that the evidences for God’s existence are utterly convincing.
Boyle, author of The Christian Virtuoso (1690), believed that Christian scientists who possess “right reason” seasoned by Christian revelation have a superior capacity to study and understand nature than do atheists, “infidels and libertines” who use reason alone. According to Boyle, Christian scientists access this “excellent information” through their study of Scripture, a revelation.
A number of Christian apologists became enamored with writing “impartial” and evidence-based, rational defenses of Christ’s resurrection. Thomas Sherlock’s Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection (1729), set in a juridical context, constituted an especially popular apologetic piece. It ran through seventeen editions.
4. From Paradigms to the Unity of Knowledge#
The scientific advances accompanying the revolution did not follow a predetermined linear path. Many roads of investigation were tried and abandoned; sudden insights could sometimes change the paradigms in which research was pursued.
“Scientists” varied considerably in their approaches to their work.
Practitioners of “Mosaic” science (based on Moses’ writings) sometimes challenged defenders of Aristotle’s scientific views
Whereas Baconians and Cartesians, though generally dismissive of the authority of the “Ancients,” might retain great respect for scriptural authority.
Antiquarians and alchemists (often one and the same person) such as Elias Ashmole (1617–92) and the polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) collected alchemical, astrological, and heraldic manuscripts as well as remnants of birds, animals, fruits, and flora. They studied esoteric traditions and comparative languages and interpreted and illustrated biblical texts (Kircher’s Noah’s Ark and The Tower of Babel).
Kircher threw himself into a search for “lost knowledge.”
Ashmole not only was interested in turning a base metal into gold, but also thought that an “Angelical Stone” possessed by Hermes, Moses, and Solomon “no Devil can stay or abide.”
Whereas many seventeenth-century historians concentrated on writing the history of kings and dynasties, these antiquarians attempted to do precise studies that would reveal the unity of all knowledge (whether historical, “scientific,” or biblical and theological).
5. From Ancient Authority to Inductive Knowledge#
For certain scholars, Francis Bacon’s empirically based “inductive” method for acquiring knowledge began to regulate research in the natural sciences, overthrowing the authority of ancient writers, including Aristotle and Ptolemy.
6. From a Closed System to an Infinite System#
A number of scientists such as Thomas Digges (1576) began to envision the universe not as a closed system but as one that stretches into infinity.
7. From Absolute Certitude to Probable Certitude#
Protestant cleric and scientist John Wilkins (1614–72), who was a founder of the Royal Society and presided over its first meeting, developed a category of probable certitude as helpful in scientific investigations. He rejected both the skeptical idea that we can know nothing with certainty and the theory that a premise must possess absolute certitude before it possesses scientific worth.
8. Physics and Metaphysics#
By Newton’s day, some scholars such as Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) of France appeared to separate metaphysics from physics (the study of the workings of the natural world).
B. Copernicus and Kepler and the Bible#
In his posthumously published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1542–43) Copernicus provided convincing evidence that the sun rather than the earth is at the center of this universe. He proposed that the earth rotates in an orbit around the sun.
Many Christians believed that the Bible teaches a geocentric theory (earth-centered) rather than heliocentric (sun-centered). In 1571 Cardinal Bellarmine, a major figure in the Roman Catholic Church’s condemnation of the Copernican theory (1616), gave lectures at Louvain defending the fluidity of the heavens. He used a literal interpretation of Scripture to back his contention.
According to Johannes Kepler, who provided striking mathematical corroboration of the heliocentric theory, opponents of the Copernican perspective believed in the Bible’s infallibility but thought anyone who defended the heliocentric viewpoint did not. For Kepler, the issue at stake was not in fact the infallibility of the Bible. The matter at hand was otherwise: How should readers interpret statements of Holy Scripture regarding the natural world?
Kepler, as did Galileo and Newton, argued that the Bible was written in accommodated language. That is, God accommodated the language of Scripture to the weaknesses of our understanding. The Bible is written in the language of appearance; it describes things as they appear to us. Nonetheless, what it relates about the natural world is “true”: it describes things truthfully as they appear. The Bible, therefore, is infallible.
In many regards, what Kepler and Galileo proposed echoed the thinking of earlier Christian advocates of an Augustinian definition of “accommodation.” This view of accommodation indicates that God did in fact accommodate Holy Scripture to the capacities of weak humans to understand.
C. The Trial of Galileo#
With this understanding of the conflict over the heliocentric theory in mind, we should probably look beyond the trial of Galileo, despite its notoriety, to locate a militant contest that pitted “science” against Christianity.
Using an improved telescope, Galileo had gathered startling evidence that indicated the Copernican theory was probable. He published his provocative findings and discoveries in The Starry Messenger (1610) and the Sunspot Letters (1613).
In 1616 the Catholic Congregation of the Index ruled in a decree that the thesis of the earth’s motion was contrary to Scripture and was not in fact physically the case. Also in 1616, the Inquisition outrightly condemned the heliocentric theory of the universe as “foolish and absurd, philosophically absurd, and formally heretical.” Copernicus’s book was put on the Index (“suspended until corrected”).
On August 26, 1623, Cardinal Barberini, an admirer of Galileo, assumed the chair of St. Peter as Pope Urban VIII. In this new ecclesiastical environment Galileo felt greater freedom to present his views more openly. Eventually, in 1632, he published Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, in which he tried to weigh fairly the strengths and weaknesses of the two systems. The work appeared to shelter an implicit defense of the Copernican perspective.
A 1632 injunction had forbidden any discussion of the earth’s motion. The appearance of Galileo’s book violated this ruling, and in 1633 he was put on trial. The fact that Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant his views about the movement of the earth reinforces the perspective that Christians upholding the geocentric view of world had won the day and that the first major battle between “science” and religion had been fought. But it should be recalled that Galileo, a petulant person, viewed himself as a faithful Christian.
Some Christians such as John Wilkens (1614–72) continued to argue that the infallible Bible was written in accommodated language, that the Bible is not a scientific textbook, and that clashes do not need to ensue between “religion” and science.
Later, distinguished Christian scientists such as Robert Boyle indicated that scientific investigation is valuable because it enhances our knowledge of how God is at work in nature. Therefore the study of science is a doxological enterprise — that is, it renders glory to God.
The Christian belief that God, the Creator, is orderly indicates that the world is orderly and runs according to “laws”
The fact that God made matter suggests that studying his creation is a worthy enterprise for the Christian
The Christian responsibility to care for one’s neighbor might be fulfilled by making scientific advances that benefit humankind.
D. Isaac de la Peyrère, Science, and Biblical Authority#
Historian Richard Popkin contends that Isaac de la Peyrère (1596–1676) was the first scholar to precipitate a genuine clash between science and Christianity.
In his work Men before Adam (1655), La Peyrère argued that the Bible recounts the history of the Jews but not of other people who lived before the Jews, the so-called “Preadamites.” He believed that this theory would account for the apparent existence of men and women before 4004 BC, a date that allegedly correlated with the way creation is described in the book of Genesis.
According to La Peyrère, everyone would be saved when the second Messiah for the Jews arrives. He eventually recanted his beliefs in Rome, blaming his Protestant background for leading him astray. His theories suggested that scientists need not confirm their research with Holy Scripture because it does not necessarily give a full account of how things came into being. In addition, La Peyrère claimed that the Bible is errant.
By the end of the seventeenth century, a number of scientists no longer felt obliged to correlate their research with the teachings of the Bible. In a remarkable reversal of roles, the Bible seemed to receive accreditation if its teachings were confirmed by “scientific” research. In a not-too-subtle fashion, “science” became a major authority in the worldview of a number of leading Europeans thinkers.
Whereas for some European scientists, including Isaac Newton, the findings of science demonstrate wonderfully the glory of God as seen through his creation, for others “science,” while confirming that God exists, challenged the Bible’s teachings that miracles take place, including even those of Jesus Christ.
VI. THE AUTHORITY OF PHILOSOPHY#
During the Middle Ages, Christian scholars often portrayed “philosophy” as the handmaiden to theology. Scholastic theology became very prominent at the University of Paris. Aristotle’s influence on Thomas Aquinas was significant.
In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Martin Luther severely criticized this influence as a cause contributing to the departure of the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine of the Eucharist from biblical teaching. Luther claimed that his own views were based on the “word of Christ.”
A number of scholars, however, have countered that Luther’s theology was allegedly greatly influenced by philosophical thought, especially the nominalism of William of Occam and Gabriel Biel.
Whereas Gisbertus Voetius had proposed in Disputations concerning Atheism (1648) that Cartesian philosophy could subvert the Christian faith, a number of Dutch Cartesians such as Johannes Clauberg and Christopher Wittich countered that Cartesian philosophy as they envisioned it had no negative entailments for theology or science or law.
Besides Cartesian thought, several other philosophical schools significantly influenced discussions of Christian doctrine and apologetics in the seventeenth century. A resurgent neo-Aristotelianism impacted the thinking of both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians.
Many English Puritans turned to the philosophical work of the French Protestant Pierre Ramus (1515–72), a logician and humanist, as a counterweight to scholastic Aristotelian thought.
The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), a moderate Thomist, was the Roman Catholic Church’s premier Scholastic authority regarding metaphysics — the study of the nature of real essences, first principles and “being.” In his Disputationes metaphysicae (1597), Suárez made distinctions between general metaphysics, general ontology, and special metaphysics.
A. “All Truth Is God’s Truth”: The Quest for an Authoritative Christian Worldview#
In the seventeenth century, a confessional age, many Protestant thinkers had a settled conviction that they knew what truth is. They were quite willing to defend their beliefs in polemical disputes, if need be. God had revealed truth in two books:
The Bible, a divine “special” revelation
The book of nature, a “general” revelation.
Because Truth (Veritas) is one, no contradiction exists between the teachings of the two books.
A number of Christian thinkers (Scholastics as well as humanists) did believe that, due to common grace, non-Christians possess insights about truth and have designed valuable logical methods or procedures to acquire it.
Is it possible to construct a unified Christian view of the world that takes into account the surge of new data and sort out responsibly claims between competing authorities? After all, adherence to the premise “All truth is God’s truth” appears to call for some kind of engagement with the “New Learning.”
A small army of scholars stepped up to organize scholarly data and arrange the disciplines into what they thought were logical relationships. They constructed “encyclopedias,” “marrows,” compendia, textbooks, and other volumes. Some were convinced that various fields of human knowledge could be unified in a harmonious and synthetic whole.
The Puritans Richardson and Ames proposed that the disciplines are integrated by Technologia, a circle of knowledge, or “Encyclopedia.” The circle begins with the mind of God, proceeding to the material things God created, then proceeding to the human beings made by God, and finally proceeding to the arts humans use to honor and glorify God (praxis and piety).
Alsted also stood out as a brilliant exponent of the essential unity of divine and secular knowledge. A Calvinist and a professor of theology, Alsted attended the Synod of Dort (1618–19) and subscribed to its Reformed doctrinal canons. In his Triumph of the Sacred Books, or, the Biblical Encyclopedia (1625), he argued that there “is no book but Sacred Scripture.” The disciplines of learning—whether physics, geography, economics, politics, jurisprudence, or others—find their grounding in the Bible. The Bible even includes subject matter such as theriologia sacra, the “special physics of the nature of terrestrial beasts.”
In his multivolume work Encyclopaedia Scientiarum Omniium (1630), Alsted attempted to provide a summary of human thought until his day. He sought to demonstrate that the divine is reflected in the unity and the logical order of all human knowledge.
Often hailed as one of Europe’s greatest educators, Jan Amos Komensky, otherwise known as Comenius (1592–1670), studied with Alsted. Comenius drew up a remarkable program called “Pansophy”. Its purpose was to bring about the harmonious integration of all knowledge with the Christian faith. Such a perspective would hopefully foster a better life for all peoples. In The Way of Light (1641, 1668) Comenius set forth a universal, if not utopian program for education and peace and plans for a Universal College. Students at the Universal College would be instructed in “new schemes for the better cultivation of all languages, and for rendering a polyglot speech more accessible and finally for establishing a language absolutely new, absolutely easy, absolutely rational, in brief a Pansophic language, the universal carrier of Light.”
The goal of gaining a unified Christian “worldview” captured the imagination of teachers at Harvard and later at Yale. Students studied the textbooks of Richardson, Ames, Alsted, and Comenius among others. During Harvard’s first decades, the writings of the Puritans Richardson and Ames in particular greatly influenced the intellectual life of the school.
B. The Dreaded Authority of the Ottoman Turks#
Enervating fear of the Ottoman Turks advancing farther into western Europe continued to haunt the minds of many Christians in Europe during the seventeenth century.
Western images of the Ottomans portrayed them as hypocritical, merciless, murderous, and licentious.
Ottoman leaders — sultans and grand viziers, their prime ministers — were known to execute anyone, of whatever rank, who disobeyed or crossed them.
To Westerners, these sultans represented the very epitome of evil despotism and tyranny. Unsavory stories about the sultans’ seraglio — their palatial harem of enslaved Christian women, eunuchs, and dwarfs—fascinated as well as disgusted Christian readers and writers. Nonetheless, with the accord of the sultans, the French government had assumed the responsibility to protect the Christian holy places and all Christian peoples in Turkish-controlled lands.
An epochal military struggle between Christian forces and the navies and armies of the Turkish Empire eventually repulsed the Ottomans’ advance into central Europe. On October 7, 1571, Don Juan’s Spanish galley fleet along with the papal and Venetian squadrons roundly defeated the Turkish navy of Ali Pasha at the Battle of Lepanto — a turning point in the struggle between Christian forces and the Turkish Muslim Empire.
In the rest of the sixteenth century, negotiators and diplomats from England and France competed for favorable trading treaties (capitulations) at the port in Constantinople. In the next century Dutch traders entered the competition for lucrative trade with the Turks.
The Treaty of Zsitvatörök (1606) engaged the Sultan and the Hapsburgs in a significant accord. It appeared to set borders on any further land advances of the Ottomans into Europe. The treaty was to hold sway for approximately a half century; it provided a temporary respite from conflicts.
But by the 1660s the Ottoman armies were on the move again toward the West. Eventually, in 1683, the armies of the Grand Vizier reached Belgrade. Thereafter, under the leadership of Kara Mustafa, they encamped menacingly at the walls of Vienna and laid siege to the city. Mustafa indicated that his goal was that “all the Christians would obey the Ottomans.”
In defense of his beleaguered capital, Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor, received help from the armies of the German electors of Bavaria and Saxony and timely reinforcements from King John Sobieski of Poland. The Christian forces prevailed in battle. The Ottomans were routed. Christians throughout Europe rejoiced and heaved a sigh of relief.
Austrians, Venetians, and Poles united in a Holy League in an attempt to pursue the Muslims toward the East.
The Austrians recaptured Buda in Hungary from Turkish control
The Venetians advanced into Dalmatia and Greece
The Poles had little success in taking Moldavia
In 1687 the armies of Charles Lorraine defeated a large force of Ottomans at Mohacs Fields. By the end of the seventeenth century, the threat of renewed incursions by Ottomans into central Europe had been substantially reduced.
In eastern Europe, Christians and Jews under Turkish rule continued to live in “millets” run by Phanariots (Greeks) for the Turkish sultans. These Eastern Christians enjoyed a semblance of autonomy and generally attempted to uphold their Orthodox beliefs.
In the 1670s the Roman Catholic Richard Simon — more widely known for his biblical scholarship — drafted a wide-ranging survey of the beliefs, church life, and status of Eastern Christians, many of whom were living under Turkish rule.
C. Patriarchal Authority in Family Life#
Fathers often continued to “rule” family life in the seventeenth century. Wives and children were generally expected to obey and honor them. Both Christian and classical teaching appeared to provide warrants for this male-dominated, hierarchical structure.
At the same time, there were women who wrote popular manuals about domestic life.
Dorothy Leigh in The Mother’s Blessing (1616) and Elizabeth Jocelin in The Mother’s Legacie to her unborne Childe (1624) gave maternal spiritual and domestic advice to children.
Between 1475 and 1640, some 163 books appeared in English intended for a female reading public.
The most comprehensive volume (1,500 pages) was Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones (1582).
The Protestant Reformers had encouraged the clergy of their respective churches to maintain homes that could serve as models of Christian piety and tranquility.
In pre-industrial Europe, many women bore onerous workloads.
They labored in the fields or in a shop while simultaneously raising children and performing household chores.
Some women ran successful businesses.
Generally speaking, most women did not have the same educational opportunities as men. Daughters of the nobility and middle classes on occasion received a measure of education.
In the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), Louis XIV stipulated that teachers should be designated in all parishes (especially those where there were “former” Protestants) to instruct children “in catechism and the necessary prayers, and to take them to Mass on working days and give them appropriate instruction on the subject …; they will teach reading and even writing to those who need to learn.” In the rural areas of France, boys and girls went to primary schools (petites écoles) together.
Mary Astell, often described as the first “English feminist,” published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694) and A Serious Proposal Part II (1697), in which she called for the creation of an educational institution where women might study and teach. In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), she pondered the complex issues women faced in trying to find a suitable husband. She also shrewdly criticized the inequalities women often encountered in their marriages.
In New England, when a husband died, his wife generally inherited his property and belongings. In his Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion (1697), the Puritan Cotton Mather counseled women on how they could gain the respect of men.
Interestingly, colonial women such as Sara Edwards, Jonathan Edwards’s wife, often played a critical role in family and church life. Although they could not vote on church matters, they with their children appeared to attend services in greater numbers than men.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, a number of women forthrightly criticized the patriarchal society in which they lived.
VII. CONCLUSION#
The “top-down” hierarchical structure of many societies in seventeenth-century Europe made it almost inevitable that Christians were obliged to interact with “superior” authorities of diverse kinds. The impact these authorities exercised on them could vary greatly.
Many Christians yielded to certain authorities without questioning them.
Others wrestled with the perplexing issue of determining which among competing authorities should have precedence.
Some Europeans attempted to extricate themselves from the constraints of “superior” authorities.
The challenge to and competition between “authorities” could take different forms. The “shock of discovery” — regarding what voyagers to the New World and elsewhere reported they actually encountered versus what writers from antiquity had indicated they should experience or witness—led to questioning of the ancient authorities.
French Huguenots had to explain the reasons they felt obliged to violate the authoritative commands of Louis XIV, a divine right king, when he ordered them to espouse Roman Catholicism.
English Puritans and Independents had to create a rationale for their risky decision to revolt against another divine right king, Charles I.
Jansenist apologists had to provide evidence from the Bible and Tradition to justify their unwillingness to submit to every demand of the papacy in Rome.
Particular Baptists had to explain the reasons they affirmed the Westminster Confession but rejected its teaching about infant baptism.
Christians who embraced aspects of Descartes’s epistemology had to explain this acceptance to other Christians who believed the philosopher’s thought sowed the seeds of atheism, or at least fostered skepticism.
A sense of proportion, however, should restrain us from portraying the seventeenth century as a cauldron always boiling over with dissent. Many Europeans were not inclined to challenge the authorities with which they interacted in a quest to establish a more “just” hierarchical order.
The weight of traditional ways of doing things, customs, and thought patterns remained heavily on many Europeans. Numerous scientists continued to seek ways to demonstrate that their research was thoroughly compatible with the authority of Scripture. Moreover, the common people often had enough to do in simply trying to survive the troubles and travails associated with daily living.
In the rural households of Europe the names of Descartes, Galileo, Cervantes, Blaise Pascal, or John Milton were scarcely known. It was much more likely the common people knew the names of the local priest or pastor, the names of their kings and queens, the name of a local baker who was hoarding bread or selling it at exorbitant prices, the name of a ruthless tax collector, the name of a roving brigand, or the name of a firebrand leader of a peasant revolt. Even if the common people often did not have a sophisticated understanding of the Christian faith, most continued to uphold the tradition of identifying themselves as “Christians,” whatever the actual level of their personal devotion might have been.