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The Age of Reason1570-1789Unreasonable?THE AGE OF REASON This is a substantial volume, a considerable achievement, giving masses of information, written in a style that is somewhat witty and debunking, though not cynical. It is well organised, clearly presented and a good addition to any church library. Professor Pearse has resisted the temptation to try to make history teach us lessons. He draws no morals. Instead, he offers history written not from an Anglo-centric or Euro-centric point of view, but with a panoramic scope. However, the book has a most curious feature: its contents. Or rather, what is left out. The author tracks the complex course of the Christian church in the Age of Reason, but it is not about the church in that age. There is hardly a sustained reference to the nature of the Enlightenment, which is arguably the most significant period since the early church and (I’m sorry to say) most certainly dwarfs the Reformation in its continuing impact on the contemporary church. There is hardly a mention of any of its heroes (or villains): Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Bayle, Rousseau. Why is this? I think because the history of the church is treated simply as the history of movements, leaders, and personalities: the rise and fall of sects and parties, the outreach of the gospel to far-flung parts. And so, at one level, that is what the history of the Church is. Indeed, perhaps this is what first comes to mind when we hear the words ‘Church history’. But surely there is more: the dominant ideas of an age and how these affect the thinking of the church, and how it behaves. Ideas have consequences. Professor Pearse confines what he has to say about ideas and ideologies to one short chapter, about five per cent of the whole. The concepts of The Age of Reason, what they meant, how they arose and were received, are largely passed over. But we need to be reminded by historians (and others) that sometimes those horrid abstract things, propositions and concepts, take on a life of their own. They call the shots, they set agendas, they deeply affect people even without them realising it. But the author does not track much of that kind of influence. Which (to my mind) is a great pity. So there is little or nothing about ‘reason’, about changing attitudes to Scripture, the rise of religious liberalism, the breakdown of orthodoxy, the rejection of the importance of the past, the rise of theories of human rights. But it is impossible to understand the modern church without understanding something about these ideas (+ Darwin and Freud). What the author has given us is valuable and interesting. We can be grateful for it. But it would have been of considerably more value if, into the history of people and movements, the author had interweaved the history of the ideas of their times, which very largely continue to be the ideas of our own time. Paul Helm,
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