My understanding too is that the eastern orthodox and for that matter most christian sects like the marionites and whatever christian sects have in recent decades been evicted from araby— all these have been spared the higher criticism school.
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I think the roots of ecclesiastical rationalism were sown by the scholastics.
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I saw your argument on that earlier—but I thought it was a pretty thin reed. not because you could not see similarities in their mode of thinking but rather because scholasticism was not the main driver of...for want of a better term ....”modernity”.
why?
for scholasticism to be the main driver of modernity—either the catholic or the protestant churches would have had to be dominant going into the modern age—because scholasticism would have need of a dominant religious carrier.
However, the problem is that both the catholic and protestant churches went into eclipse in europe after the 30 years war in Europe; 1619-1649.
What we know as the enlightenment of the 1700’s (or the 18th century) is the ascendency of state power. and state power needed a different driver for legitimacy than either the catholic or protestant churches which it usurped.
consider the great losers of the 30 years war 1619-1649. were both the catholic and protestant churches. In the catholic church the reason they lost was because state power triumphed over papal power. The catholic church has been in continuous decline ever since. protestant church lost and specifically the greatest losers were the calvinists. that’s why most of the churches in the 13 colonies were calvinists.(the church of england then as now took on the colors of the age—then it was calvinist in the colonies) this was true of the puritans, the presbyerians, the german swiss dutch and swedish reformed churches were all calvinsts as were the french hugonauts. their monument to the world was the american constitution.(the idea of a limited government, separation of powers, a federalist system and balance of power —sprang from the very calvinist madison and his friends.) But the calvinists in the USA instantly went into decline after the revolution. By the 1840’s they were in a minority in the USA as larger methodist and baptist denominations became the majority. (only much later did the catholics become the majority in the USA.)
Now remember the historical point. You need a driver or a carrier for an idea. state power has been increasing for several centuries. Since both the catholic church and the protestant church have been in relative decline for the last several centuries—then the main driver of modernism has to be elsewhere.
and of course you have heard my other arguments on this matter—the greeks. that is, what everyone learns in high school and college. and it is used in the service of state power.
Scholasticism introduced the notion that God was subject to human categorization and that his actions were understandable by the categories of human logic, which Protestant scholasticism continued.
The Scholastics set the ball rolling for the Nominalist reaction within the Catholic Church that later led to both Protestantism and to the Enlightenment centuries later.
The republican system in the United States had more to do with the rise of Pietism and the First Great Awakening, which altered the character of American Reformed Protestantism. Of course, both developed in a reaction to the changes following the 30 Years’ War.
Calvin’s Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts represent the true nature of unreformed Calvinism.