Abstract

The Huguenot skeptic Pierre Bayle , as an early modern road-not-taken for Reformed theology, can inform a deconstructive postmodern theology. Bayle's understanding of power, knowledge and God and his spirituality developed in response to the constraints placed upon his thought not only by Catholic persecutors, but by Calvinist opponents as well. I draw upon the work Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, to show how Bayle employed a set of "strategies of resistance" to the power of the church of his day. In particular he resisted the limits placed on the forms of thought permitted within his religious community while continuing to claim allegiance to that community. Chapter 1 recounts the exiled Bayle's conflict with the Walloon Consistory in Rotterdam and his enmity with the theologian Pierre Jurieu. Chapter 2 addresses the first of a set of strategies of resistance to coercive ecclesial power: to point out and critique the role power plays in the formation of theological truth, and thereby delegitimate it. The next strategy is to relativize theological truth claims. The third chapter examines the way in which Bayle does this: he notes that theological truth is not static, but is an expression of a human community that is itself diverse, made up of many different people, no two of whom think alike. The fourth chapter examines another strategy: Bayle's preference for using metaphorical, and thus inherently contestable, language to express theological commitments. The next chapter highlights Bayle's extreme emphasis on the notion of God's inscrutability, and therefore the inappropriateness of imposing theological consensus on the church. Finally, chapter six looks at the impact of power on Bayle's spiritual life. A deep bifurcation between his Christian and philosophical identities resulted in a "technology of the self," a spirituality, that was itself a strategy of resistence to the coercive character of ecclesial power. In every case, we see Bayle's resistance to any attempts to create theological uniformity by any means other than reasoned persuasion. At each step along the way, Bayle sought to protect the diversity of the church from the dangers of a coercive uniformity