_ Source: _Volume 35, Issue 1, pp 168 - 190 While there is ample evidence for the popularity and influence up to the mid-eighteenth century of Grotius’s demonstration of the exclusive truth of the Christian religion, a fresh look at the reasons for the discontinuation of this line of apologetics can be attempted. In Germany in the late 1770s, G. E. Lessing claimed that all available arguments of Christian apologetics would ‘evaporate’ when analysed from a critical philosophical perspective. This did (...) not simply refer to the issue of the historicity of biblical narratives. Since rabbinic Judaism as well as Islam belonged to the targets of the apologetic tradition, it turns out that the concept of the plurality of religions which had found its expression in Boccaccio’s work in the ‘parable of the three rings’ only to be rejected, e.g., by Campanella, acquired a new significance in debates about the truth of natural and revealed religion. (shrink)

The conflict about the fragments of "Apologia or Defense for the Rational Reverers of God" by the Hamburg scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus and the Counter-propositions by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing caused an uproar in the Lutheran theological world of the 18th century. Would this form of Christianity, rooted in the tradition of the Lutheran Reformation, be superseded by the Enlightenment if literary, historical and religious-philosophical criticism of the Bible were now allowed? Lessing presents his solution of the problem in Axioms, which (...) this book places in the context of his overall thought. (shrink)

In the 16th century philological competence and theological dynamics led to a new appreciation of the Bible as the foundation of the Christian Church. As a result the question of hermeneutics became an important chapter of theological controversy. The studies presented in this volume analyse the argumentative form of the early modern Philologia Sacra and how it was influenced by apologetic impulses in the formation and rendition of ecclesiastical doctrine. Particular attention is paid to Salomon Glassius as the most representative (...) author of the Philologia Sacra in Lutheranism. (shrink)