Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature

Nathaniel Culverwell

ISBN 10: 086597327X / ISBN 13: 9780865973275

Published by Liberty Fund Inc, US, 2002

About this Item

Nathaniel Culverwell is considered one of the principal scholars of the seventeenth century. This collection of sermons he delivered in 1645-46, examines the relationship between reason and faith, and forms one of the first attempts in English Protestantism to stress the role of reason in ethics and to develop a doctrine of natural law. Culverwell represents a crucial intersection in the discussion of reason and faith. While providing a link between the Calvinist dependence on faith and grace and the Enlightenment dependence on reason and humanism, Culverwell's Discourse is a picture of the world on the brink of the Enlightenment. The seventeenth century was an era that included the Puritan migration from England to America and the English Civil War. During this period, an understanding of the divine, and the interrelationship between reason and revelation, was often a matter of violent debate. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature spans several centuries, during which the very nature of knowledge as a product of reason, not the means of revelation, gained ascendancy in Western civilization. This discourse was crucial to the development of a theoretical grounding for individual challenges to established authorities, both political and ecclesiastical, and thus to the development of modern theories of liberty and responsibility.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780865973275

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature
• Publisher: Liberty Fund Inc, US
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 086597327X
• ISBN 13: 9780865973275
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 596 grams

About this title

Synopsis

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort at intellectual mediation in the deep religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. On one side was the antinomian assertion of extreme Calvinists that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace and thereby free from ordinary moral obligations. Opposite to that was the Arminian rejection of predestination and assertion that Christ died for all, not just for the elect.

Robert A. Greene is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Hugh MacCallum was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto.

About the Author

Nathaniel Culverwell; Edited by Greene and MacCallum