1
" The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world. "
― Brad S. Gregory , The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
8
" But upon closer inspection, the Dutch Republic is vastly different from the Spanish Netherlands, specifically concerning the relationship between religion and politics. In fact, that relationship in the Dutch Republic is unique in Western Europe. In the Dutch Republic there is no state church, as there are in France, Spain, England, German Lutheran territories, Scandinavian countries, or the Reformed Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire. People in the Dutch Republic do not have to belong to a particular religion. Well into the seventeenth century, the dominant, state-supported, public church in the Dutch Republic includes only a small minority of the population. Equally unique is the fact that, from its establishment, the Dutch Republic remains a haven for religious groups of all sorts. "
― Brad S. Gregory , Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World
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" These cities are also important centers of commerce, artisanal crafts, education, and culture—nodes in a network of communication and travel that connects the cities of northern France, England, and the Low Countries to the Italian peninsula. Their influence puts them in a position to shape the religious life of their communities in crucial ways. Over the previous couple of centuries, many of these cities have wrested control of church institutions away from bishops, precisely because many urban leaders were conscientious Christians who cared about the Church.22 If the bishops wouldn’t oversee reforms, secular authorities would. "
― Brad S. Gregory , Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World
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" The key point is not, as is commonly but wrongly believed, that the empirical investigation of the natural world made or makes a transcendent God’s existence increasingly implausible. It is rather that this presumption depended historically and continues to depend on a conception of God as a hypothetical supernatural agent in competition with natural causality, polemically vulgarized, for example, in the rants of Richard Dawkins about the “God hypothesis” and the putative “God delusion.” In diametric contrast, with the Christian conception of God as transcendent creator of the universe, it is precisely and only because of his radical difference from creation that God can be present to and through it.89 This is the metaphysics that continues to underlie and make possible a sacramental worldview, against supersessionist conceptions of history, in combination with any and all scientific findings. "
― Brad S. Gregory , The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
