Reclaiming Theology for the Enlightenment: The Case of Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757)

Abstract

The new millennium appears to be ushering in a new view of the Enlightenment. The synthesis of the 1930s to the 1970s had posited a unitary Enlightenment that was the matrix of a modern secular or secularizing culture. The authority of reason and science either fully displaced, or fundamentally challenged and thus forced the reconstruction of, the claims of belief and tradition. From the 1970s a social history of ideas and institutions explored the Enlightenment's seemingly infinite regional and national variations, subverting the unitary notion and yielding a mass of new information. The works of J.G.A. Pocock and Jonathan Israel, James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley, have begun to build on this accumulated scholarship, offering a new synthesis that rests on two related notions.