United Kingdom, July 14 -- Project Id: 86803
Description: Objective
The debates of intellectuals both Catholic and Protestant have much to tell us about the nature of religious warfare in early modern Europe. In the seventeenth century, the small numbers of radical Catholics and Protestants who favoured imposing their own version of Christianity on others by force were accused by moderates (no less religiously sincere) within their own communities of promoting wars incompatible with Christian orthodoxy. Religious faith, the moderates insisted, was a supernatural thing, a gift of God, rather than a natural thing, a creation of rational humans, and thus could not be imposed by force. Arguments for religious war in the sense of evangelisatio...