The Search for a Rational Faith
Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:17th Mar '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity. So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers? The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith. Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K. Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science. From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience. This book chronicles that story. It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of well-known figures such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled with the question of the reason to believe. It is the story of Christian apologists who crafted intellectually sophisticated defenses of the faith. And above all, it is the story of the development of an idea-the idea that there is a rational basis for Christian belief. This book shows how that idea was transmitted from England to America in the seventeenth century and how it continued to develop and transform over the next four centuries in response to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, new theories of religious epistemology, and the ethical challenge of the civil rights movement. The Search for a Rational Faith is the story of what that idea meant in the past and what it still means today, in a new era of secularization.
Williams makes the case that Christian apologetics, far from being some abstruse academic pastime, was-for centuries-an enormous component of America's intellectual and cultural glue, a project that shaped the country's leading educational institutions and left a serious imprint on generations of national leaders inside and outside the bounds of the church, from U.S. presidents to novelists and philosophers. And it was an enterprise focused on a question that ought to interest anyone who cares about religious and intellectual history, even if historians cannot approach the question directly: Is Christianity true? * Molly Worthen, author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump *
The Search for a Rational Faith is an unusually illuminating history of how American Christian believers have tried to demonstrate the rational and scientifically compatible character of their faith (though also, at times, of whether they should try to do so). The book's historical reach is broad (from the Puritans to the present), its readings charitable for a huge cast of characters, its judgments measured, and its parsing of "evidences" and "apologetics" unfailingly wise. Williams' careful attention to historical contexts also demonstrates how much the specialized debates he examines affected, and were affected by, central developments in the nation's general history. * Mark Noll, author of America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911 *
Apologetics, or the effort to defend the reasonableness of Christianity, has a long American history, and in this brilliant and sweeping book, Daniel K. Williams tells the story with narrative skill and keen insight. Along the way, he overturns old assumptions, sheds new light on familiar figures, and explains why liberal Protestants abandoned the apologetic project while conservatives embraced it. A compelling and even haunting account. * Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine *
ISBN: 9780197748039
Dimensions: 239mm x 167mm x 38mm
Weight: 771g
464 pages