To the editor:
I am in agreement with Bishop Robert Barron in part two of “Christian apologists, wake up!” In all, that is, but one point. I do not believe the Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire, Diderot, and Spinoza, set out to undermine religion.
Each did have an encounter with the Catholic Church. Diderot had considered becoming a priest, Voltaire had been educated by the Jesuits (1704-1711).
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On the first day of my recent vacation, I perused N.T. Wright’s latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible.
A point that Wright makes in a number of the articles is that modernity and Christianity propose fundamentally different meta-narratives in regard to the meaning and trajectory of history.
Modernity — at least in its Western form– is predicated on the assumption that history came to its climax in the mid- to late-18th century, with the definitive victory of empirical science in the epistemological arena and liberal democracy in the political arena.
Basic to this telling of the story is that modernity emerged victorious after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism and tyranny. The matrix for these negative states of affairs was none other than the Christian religion, which enforced a blind dogmatism on the one hand and an oppressive political arrangement on the other.
