Paul Lim, Vanderbilt University. Istanbul University Faculty of Theology, October 18, 2016
One of the unforeseen consequences of the Protestant Reformation was placement of an unbearable burden on the spines of newly printed Bibles as the sole authority for all matters of faith and praxis. Further, the emphasis on perspicuity of Scripture – that all (relevant) passages of the Bible are clear to all believers – means an equally unintended exaltation of human reason as the final arbiter of all differing scriptural interpretations. This became the seed that eventually bore fruit in Enlightenment England. In this paper, we will highlight three aspects of what I would call “reconfiguration of the sacred”: (1) idea of Mystery; (2) related doctrine of the Trinity; (3) and the reliability of the texts/MSS of the Bible and the historicity of some of the events therein. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the fact that it was not a straight path from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, where decline of magic and evaporation of belief in divine mystery inexorably happened. It was far more contested, thus far more complex.
Professor Paul C.H. Lim is an award-winning historian of Reformation- and post-Reformation Europe. His latest book, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), won the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Prize as the best book in history/theology by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. He has published two other books in that area: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008); and In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Context (Brill, 2004).
