RELIGION AS KNOWLEDGE: PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM

The Protestant theology which came to dominate English thought in the post-Reformation era had a number of important implications. The sharp distinction between two sources of religious truth – revelation and nature – not only provided the ideological basis for the separation of the sacred realm from the secular, but also spawned two discrete species of the newly ideated ‘religion’ – ‘natural religion’ and ‘revealed religion’. Along with the dual forms of religion came an increasing emphasis upon knowledge and correct belief. There are a number of reasons for this unfortunate preoccupation. Calvin, in his Institutes, had fired a broadside against the ‘Popish fiction’ of implicit faith. On account of the complexity of such cardinal doctrines as the Trinity, medieval school men had conceded that not all members of the Church could aspire to explicit knowledge of and therefore belief in more esoteric and subtle dogmas. Those of modest intellect were therefore encouraged to have ‘implicit faith’ in these abstruse formulas, ‘implicit faith’ being essentially the belief that the doctors of the Church had got it right. It was, in short, faith in the faith of the theologians. This concession, in Calvin's view, was ‘the surest precipice to destruction’. ‘Faith’, he insisted, ‘consists in the knowledge of God and Christ (John xvii.3), not in reverence for the Church.’