Theological Origins of Modernity

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out the concomitant struggle within Christianity to purge the church of
corruption that inevitably accompanied its involvement in temporal affairs.
Does all of this then mean that the modern liberal world is a form of
Protestant Christianity as Mitchell suggests? Th e modern world certainly
arises out of the Reformation and has a strongly Protestant character even
when it seems most secular. Insofar as Protestantism always defi ned itself
in terms of the deus absconditus, secularism can be understood as merely
one of its extreme forms. Indeed, even if our age is defi ned by the death
of God, as Nietzsche proclaimed, it is still defi ned by its relationship to
God and therefore still defi ned theologically, even if only by a thoroughly
negative theology. Nonetheless, it is also undeniable that theology in the
modern age was itself transformed by its encounter with the ancient world
and the development of a secular and a civic humanism. Th e humanist
recovery of ancient ideas and practices has thus had an impact directly or
indirectly (through Christianity) on the formation of modernity. Here it
is principally a question of how much weight should be assigned to each
element, and it is not surprising that diff erent scholars come to diff erent
conclusions about this point.
Th e most powerful argument for the revolutionary character of modernity,
however, lies in the role it assigns to natural science. It is science that
defi nes the modern world and science (or philosophy) that is widely considered
to be incompatible with religion. However, over the last twenty years
scholarship has demonstrated the deep debt that seventeenth-century science
owes to Christianity and to the nominalist revolution in particular.
Determining the importance of Christianity for modernity and for modern
science is made more diffi cult in the Reformation period by two factors,
fi rst, the increasing importance of belief or faith and decreasing importance
of practice as a measure of one’s religiosity and, second, the proliferation of
Christian sects. Christianity had long sought to defi ne and enforce orthodoxy,
but from the fourteenth century on the church found it increasingly
diffi cult to sustain dogmatic unity. Even before Luther there was a growing
multiplicity of ideas and practices within Christianity, and the Reformation
saw an explosion of sectarian diversity. It is diffi cult to judge whether
these sects are Christian in a narrow sense, but there is no question that
most of their members were deeply religious. In trying to determine the
impact of religion on modernity it is crucial to recognize this diversity and
not simply assume that those who dissent from a particular doctrine are
irreligious or atheistic.
Hobbes has oft en been characterized as an atheist, for the most part in
his own time by sectarians who believed that anyone who did not share