Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 Rational Theology: Henry More's An Antidote against Atheism (1653)
- 2 ‘Prudent Charity’: Richard Baxter's The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667)
- 3 A Settled Mind? John Wilkins's Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675)
- 4 God's Naturalist: John Ray's The Wisdom of God (1691)
- 5 God's Philologist: Richard Bentley's The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1692)
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - ‘Prudent Charity’: Richard Baxter's The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667)
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 Rational Theology: Henry More's An Antidote against Atheism (1653)
- 2 ‘Prudent Charity’: Richard Baxter's The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667)
- 3 A Settled Mind? John Wilkins's Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675)
- 4 God's Naturalist: John Ray's The Wisdom of God (1691)
- 5 God's Philologist: Richard Bentley's The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1692)
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Life is short: and we are dull: and eternal things are necessary: and the souls that depend on our teaching are precious.
The Reformed Pastor (1656)In the previous chapter we considered the surprising development by which a Cambridge Platonist – committed in many ways to the revivification of old ideas – gave England its first work of physico-theology, decades before the genre would begin to flourish in the 1690s. This chapter continues to explore the pre-history of that explosion, in the work of an author of a very different temper. Where More made clear the nature of his relationship to contemporary ‘sensualists’ in An Antidote, Richard Baxter's relationship to the developments associated with modern science is notoriously difficult to pin down. Ejected from the established church and largely self-educated, in many ways Baxter stands apart, not only from More, but from all the other authors considered in this study. The natural theology that infuses his works of practical divinity as well as his more scholastic volumes thus represents an important contribution to natural theology in the seventeenth century: the puritan natural theology. Crucially, unlike many of his Cambridge Platonist contemporaries, Baxter presumed an audience whose consciences had already been awakened by grace; unlike many of his fellow puritans, however, he argued stringently that reason could and should be deployed in the pursuit of theological truth, and even subjected scripture to rational scrutiny.
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- Natural Theology in the Scientific RevolutionGod's Scientists, pp. 49 - 70Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014