Peter Harrison’s Challenge to the Secular Mythos

Peter Harrison, a distinguished historian of science, religion, and ideas, has profoundly shaped contemporary scholarship on the interwoven histories of these domains. His acclaimed works—‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (1990), The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007), and The Territories of Science and Religion (2017)—have dismantled simplistic “conflict” narratives, often revealing the theological foundations of modernity. In Some New World, Harrison takes on a new target: the categories of “naturalism” and “supernaturalism,” which he argues are not timeless features of human thought but historical constructs emerging from Western Christian theology.

Harrison’s bold thesis reframes the divide between “natural” and “supernatural” as a theological drama, with the term “supernatural” arising in the medieval period and “naturalism” only solidifying in the nineteenth century. These categories, he argues, are not neutral or universal but deeply embedded in the theological debates of Christianity’s past. Modern naturalism, Harrison contends, owes its secular framework to theological concepts like providence and the laws of nature, which were gradually reinterpreted during the Enlightenment as impersonal mechanisms.

The book’s title, Some New World, is a deliberate inversion of David Hume’s dismissal of ancient miracle accounts as relics of a “pre-scientific mindset” alien to modern rationality. Harrison provocatively suggests that secular naturalism—not the enchanted cosmos of earlier cultures—is the real anomaly in human history. This reversal underscores his central project: deconstructing secular modernity’s self-conception as a rational triumph over religious credulity. In doing so, he reframes modernity as the true “new world.”

The Illusion of “Progress”

A particularly compelling theme is Harrison’s argument that theories of progress are repackaged versions of Christian eschatology. Just as Christian theology envisions history moving toward divine fulfillment, secular narratives depict human progress as inevitable and linear. Several notable scholars in the first half of the twentieth century made similar claims. In his classic Meaning in History (1949), Karl Löwith, for example, argued that modern philosophies of history, particularly those emphasizing progress, were secularized versions of Christian eschatology. He identified thinkers like Hegel and Marx as repurposing Christian notions of redemption and fulfillment, with history viewed as the unfolding of an ultimate, rational end. Earlier, Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-43), critiqued the Enlightenment’s confidence in progress, arguing that it was rooted in a naive optimism that ignored the enduring reality of sin. He saw this secular optimism as a distortion of the Christian hope for redemption. Earlier still was Hebert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which exposed the tendency of historians to impose a narrative of progress onto the past, portraying earlier societies as inferior stages on the way to modernity. Butterfield linked this tendency to Protestant historiography, which framed the Reformation as a decisive break with the “darkness” of the Middle Ages. Even the Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, particularly in works like True Humanism (1936), critiqued secular humanism for adopting Christian ideals of progress while discarding their theological foundations. For Maritain, the result was an impoverished vision of history that lacked a transcendent purpose.

Aligning himself with this corpus of work, Harrison connects progress narratives to Protestant critiques of Catholicism, particularly cessationism, which confined miracles to biblical times and framed later claims as fraudulent. Enlightenment thinkers extended this framework, rejecting miracles altogether. This theological scaffolding became the foundation for secular naturalism, with “laws of nature” transformed from divine governance to impersonal mechanisms. By connecting progressivist theories to their theological origins, Harrison does more than critique modernity’s self-image; he calls into question the neutrality and universality of its claims. If theories of progress are not purely “rational” but deeply indebted to Christian eschatology, they lose some of their authority as impartial explanations of history. Instead, they appear as contingent products of a specific cultural and intellectual tradition.

The Contested Nature of “Belief”

Harrison also highlights the transformation of “belief” from relational trust to intellectual assent. Drawing on Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion (1963), Harrison traces the evolution of belief from relational trust (pistis) in early Christianity to propositional assent in the modern era. This shift, he argues, paved the way for modern skepticism by reframing faith as an intellectual commitment requiring evidential justification. Thus, by essentially historicizing concepts like naturalism, belief, and progress, Harrison challenges the assumption that secularism represents a universal trajectory. Instead, he reveals it as a contingent product of theological debates and their cultural aftermath.

Hume, Miracles, and the Invention of Belief

Harrison opens the first chapter of Some New World with an intriguing archival detail: David Hume, often celebrated as a philosophical giant, was categorized as a historian in the British Library’s twentieth-century catalogue. For Harrison, this classification is no accident. It underscores the historical assumptions underlying Hume’s celebrated arguments—particularly his critique of miracles, which Harrison argues depend on “covert historical commitments” rooted in Enlightenment narratives of progress and cultural superiority (14).

Hume’s critique of miracles, articulated in Of Miracles (part of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), hinges on the idea that miracles are “violations of the laws of nature” and therefore inherently improbable. For Hume, the cumulative testimony supporting the consistency of natural laws outweighs any single account of a miraculous event. However, Harrison critiques this reliance on testimony as paradoxical. While Hume depends on testimony to affirm natural laws, he dismisses reports of miracles from “ignorant and barbarous nations” as inherently untrustworthy. This dismissal reveals Hume’s Eurocentric bias, privileging Western rationality while casting other societies as irrational or primitive.

Harrison extends his critique by demonstrating that Hume’s understanding of miracles presupposes a modern concept of natural laws unavailable to pre-modern societies. By retroactively imposing this framework, Hume distorts the phenomena he critiques. Furthermore, Hume’s depiction of religion as a system of propositional beliefs requiring evidential justification reflects a distinctly modern shift in the understanding of faith. Harrison underscores the theological roots of this shift: the seventeenth-century concept of “laws of nature,” central to Hume’s argument, originated within a theistic framework that attributed these laws to divine governance. Hume’s secularization of this concept exemplifies a key theme in Harrison’s work—the deep indebtedness of modern naturalism to theological traditions it claims to transcend. Ultimately, Hume’s critique of miracles cannot be disentangled from the cultural and theological milieu of eighteenth-century Britain.

While Harrison does not explicitly link Hume’s critique of miracles to Protestant anti-Catholic polemics, other scholars have explored this connection. For instance, Stephen Buckle, in Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (2000), argues that Hume’s critique is shaped not only by philosophical reasoning but also by the religious debates of his time, particularly the Protestant emphasis on reason and its rejection of Catholic miracle claims. Hume’s arguments, Earman suggests, are as much a product of eighteenth-century theological and cultural tensions as they are of Enlightenment rationalism. While Harrison does not develop this Protestant anti-Catholic theme in this chapter, he makes it central to a later part of his book, where he further explores the theological currents shaping Enlightenment naturalism.

As he hinted in the introduction, in the second chapter Harrison now turns to how the concept of “belief” has evolved across cultures and historical contexts, arguing that the modern Western notion of belief as propositional assent is not universal but historically contingent. Drawing on anthropological, linguistic, and historical studies, he argues that intellectualized belief has not always been central to religious practice and is, in fact, a historically contingent concept.

Harrison begins with Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard’s (1567-1622) struggle to translate the Christian Credo (“I believe”) into Mi’kmaq, illustrating the difficulty of conveying abstract belief to cultures that prioritize communal and experiential spirituality. He cites further ethnographic studies, such as those of the Wari’ people of the Amazon and the Dinka of South Sudan, to support his claim that Western concepts of belief are shaped by specific theological and linguistic developments.

Central to his argument is the contention that early Christian pistis (Greek) and fides (Latin) were primarily relational, signifying trust in God and the Christian community rather than propositional assent. Harrison traces how this relational understanding evolved into “right belief” through institutional changes in the Church, such as the formalization of doctrine in the Nicene Creed. Drawing on scholars like scholars like Teresa Morgan, especially her Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (2015), Harrison attributes this shift to the Church’s growing emphasis on authority and its routinization of charismatic leadership.

While Harrison’s analysis is characteristically erudite and thought-provoking, it raises questions. First, his claim that “there is little evidence that faith was understood primarily as right belief, or as assenting to propositions” (34) appears to understate the doctrinal elements present in early Christianity. Scholars like J.N.D. Kelly (Early Christian Creeds) and Robert Louis Wilken (The Spirit of Early Christian Thought) emphasize the centrality of creedal statements in early Christianity, showing that doctrinal beliefs were integral to the faith from its inception. Larry W. Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity) further demonstrates how early Christian worship was inseparable from specific beliefs about Jesus’ divinity. These scholarly works and others challenge the notion that early Christianity lacked a focus on propositional beliefs. While it is true that lived practice and community were vital aspects of early Christian life, doctrinal formulations played a crucial role in defining and preserving the faith.

Second, while Harrison draws parallels between Greek religion and the New Testament references to pistis (36), this, too, is a debatable point. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of early Christianity was its distinctive conception of pistis, which arguably aligns more closely with the covenantal loyalty found in the Hebrew tradition than with the philosophical or religious notions of pistis in Greek thought. To be sure, in Greek culture, pistis often denoted trust or confidence in human relationships, particularly in social and political contexts. For instance, in Homeric epics, pistis is linked to reliability and loyalty among allies. Philosophically, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle associated pistis with persuasion or belief as a lower cognitive state compared to knowledge (episteme). In Greek religion, the gods were objects of worship and ritual observance rather than epistemological assent. Religious practice emphasized appeasement through offerings and rituals rather than the covenantal loyalty that characterizes biblical faith.

However, the Hebrew equivalent of pistis, emunah, seems to convey a relational trust deeply rooted in propositional beliefs, as articulated in the Torah and the covenants. It reflects a deeply relational dynamic between God and his people, grounded in God’s fidelity to his promises and the reciprocal loyalty of his followers. Biblical examples like Exodus 14:31, where Israel’s trust in God follows his deliverance at the Red Sea, show how relational trust and propositional truths were intertwined. This trust is not blind but is based on a set of propositional truths about God: his power, his faithfulness to his promises, and his covenantal relationship with Israel. Similarly, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) combines relational loyalty with doctrinal assertions about God’s oneness. Passages like Habakkuk 2:4 (“the righteous shall live by his faithfulness”) also illustrate the centrality of this trust, which encompasses belief, action, and covenantal obedience. While emunah encompasses relational loyalty and trust, it also presupposes a cognitive commitment to certain truths about God.

It was this combination that profoundly influenced early Christian conceptions of pistis, which also set them apart from other Greek religious traditions. Indeed, the New Testament continues this dynamic. Jesus’s calls to believe in him (e.g. John 14:1) and Paul’s writings on faith (e.g. Romans 10:9) integrate trust and doctrinal content. Early Christian creeds, like the Apostles’ Creed, demonstrate the Church’s emphasis on articulating core beliefs, both as communal affirmations and as doctrinal boundaries against heresy. As Hurtado argues, early Christian worship was characterized by a distinctive devotion to Jesus as Lord, which included both relational trust and propositional belief. This devotion was expressed in confessional formulas, hymns, and baptismal creeds, which required converts to articulate doctrinal commitments, such as belief in Jesus’s divinity and his resurrection.

While Harrison draws parallels between pistis in the New Testament and Greek religious thought, this comparison risks flattening Christianity’s distinctive theological innovations. Unlike Greek religion’s transactional rituals, early Christianity offered a covenantal relationship with God rooted in specific theological claims, such as Jesus’s divine identity and mission. This fusion of relational and propositional elements marked Christianity’s departure from both Greek and Jewish traditions.

Ironically, Harrison’s portrayal of early Christian “belief” as primarily relational rather than doctrinal echoes aspects of nineteenth-century German mediating theology—a tradition whose broader implications Harrison critiques elsewhere in the book. Figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Shailer Mathews, and many others at the turn of the century, championed the experiential and relational dimensions of faith, emphasizing personal piety and the feeling of absolute dependence on God as the essence of religion. In doing so, however, these theologians downplayed doctrinal adherence, favoring a more subjective and individualistic understanding of Christianity.

Mediating theologians aimed to navigate a middle path between orthodox confessionalism and rationalist liberalism, reconciling traditional Christian beliefs with the intellectual currents of their time. This approach faced sharp criticism from more conservative theologians of the same era, who argued that doctrinal orthodoxy was essential to preserving the integrity of the Christian faith. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, John Henry Newman, Charles Hodge, Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth, to name just a few, all defended the primacy of traditional doctrines, cautioning against the potential relativism and theological erosion inherent in prioritizing individual experience over communal and creedal standards.

This tension is also evident in Harrison’s discussion of medieval heresies. He contends that the suppression of heresies was driven more by sociopolitical stability than by theological purity, implying that propositional belief was a secondary concern (48). However, the Church’s dual role as both a spiritual and temporal authority meant that heresies represented threats on multiple fronts. The theological dimension, far from secondary, was integral to the Church’s mission and identity. The writings of Church Fathers and medieval theologians demonstrate a profound preoccupation with heretical doctrines as theological deviations that endangered the faith. Indeed, figures like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine dedicated significant portions of their works to refuting heretical teachings. Later, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae provides meticulous refutations of heretical positions, further emphasizing the importance of correct belief to Christian orthodoxy.

The Church’s suppression of heresies was therefore inherently tied to the principle of individual assent to doctrinal truth. Councils like Lateran IV (1215) explicitly condemned heretical doctrines, while public recantations symbolized the Church’s insistence on aligning personal belief with its teachings. Even the inquisitorial process, controversial though it was, presupposed that individuals could and should align their beliefs with correct doctrine. Harrison’s focus on the sociopolitical dimensions of heresy suppression risks creating a false dichotomy, undervaluing the theological imperatives that shaped these efforts.

To be sure, Harrison does admit that “doctrines, teachings, and cosmological assumptions were integral [my emphasis]” to the life of the Church (58). But his overall analysis here seems to reflect a broader trend within some strands of theological and historical scholarship that prioritize relational and experiential aspects of faith over doctrinal or propositional elements. This trend often emerges as a critique of modern, Western, and post-Enlightenment conceptions of religion, which tend to reduce religious belief to intellectual assent to abstract propositions. While this critique holds some merit, Harrison’s emphasis appears to overcorrect, underestimating the integrative role of doctrinal content in early Christian and biblical traditions.

The Attack on “Implicit Faith”

Harrison is closer to the mark in his critique of the Protestant Reformation’s contribution to the rise of instrumental reason. He rightly identifies how the Reformation’s emphasis on individual interpretation of Scripture and rejection of ecclesiastical authority inadvertently encouraged a rationalistic and evidential approach to religious belief. This shift aligned with the intellectual currents of early modernity, where reason increasingly became a tool for evaluating the justification of belief based on evidence. While empowering in some respects, this development ultimately posed challenges for the coherence and accessibility of faith, as instrumental reason proved both philosophically unattainable as an absolute standard and practically impractical for many believers.

In his third chapter, Harrison examines the transformative evolution of faith, tracing its shift from the medieval model of “implicit faith” to the Reformation’s demand for personal responsibility and rational justification. He argues that this shift profoundly shaped modern epistemology, laying the foundation for what he calls the “ethics of belief.”

Harrison begins with another anecdote from Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard, who refused to baptize individuals unable to articulate doctrinal beliefs. According to Harrison, this marked a departure from the medieval Church’s acceptance of implicit faith, in which baptism and communal participation sufficed for Christian identity. Harrison situates this within Augustine’s view that baptism initiated believers into faith, providing a pathway for later intellectual understanding. Implicit faith, grounded in trust in the Church’s authority, was also championed by Aquinas, who distinguished between the ideal of explicit doctrinal understanding and the sufficiency of implicit faith for those with limited comprehension.

But again, some pushback is possible here. While it is true that baptism and communal participation were considered foundational elements of Christian identity in the medieval period, many theologians indeed demanded more from believers, particularly concerning doctrinal understanding and personal commitment. Anselm emphasized that faith was not merely passive trust or communal affiliation but an active intellectual endeavor to grasp the truths of the Christian faith. His Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo illustrate the necessity of deep theological reflection as an essential aspect of faith. While Aquinas did affirm the sufficiency of implicit faith for those who lacked the capacity for full doctrinal comprehension (e.g. the uneducated or children), he simultaneously emphasized the necessity of explicit faith for those who were capable. In the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 2, a. 1-10), Aquinas argued that explicit belief in foundational doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, was required for salvation for those able to comprehend them.

At any rate, according to Harrison, the notion of “implicit faith” was upended with the Reformation. Reformers like Luther and Calvin insisted that true faith required individual assent and understanding. Luther’s dictum that “every man is responsible for his own faith” and Calvin’s dismissal of implicit faith illustrate this radical shift (71). Faith, Harrison contends, was redefined as a deeply personal responsibility, aligning with the emergent “ethics of belief,” in which beliefs demanded rational justification.

Harrison connects this Protestant ethos to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding framed belief as both a moral duty and a rational obligation. This trajectory culminated in William Clifford’s nineteenth-century essay “The Ethics of Belief,” which argued that holding beliefs without sufficient evidence was morally indefensible. Harrison highlights this cultural shift: belief transformed from a communal, relational trust into an individual epistemological responsibility.

While Harrison acknowledges the critical inquiry this transformation enabled, he critiques its unintended consequences. The Reformation’s emphasis on rational justification, he argues, paved the way for instrumental reason—procedural and calculative approaches to belief that often undermined its relational and devotional dimensions. This tension, Harrison notes, lies at the heart of modernity’s fragmented understanding of religious life.

Harrison also draws on Hegel to illustrate the philosophical implications of the Reformation’s focus on individual reason and autonomy. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies the Reformation as a decisive moment in the development of self-consciousness and freedom. For Hegel, Luther’s insistence on the primacy of individual faith marks a turning point where subjective conscience supplanted institutional mediation as the locus of religious authority. This, Hegel suggests, initiated a more universal and rational spirituality.

Besides Locke, Harrison discusses the work of William Chillingworth (1602–1644), who further exemplifies this intellectual trajectory. A seventeenth-century Anglican theologian, Chillingworth epitomized the Protestant emphasis on individual judgment and reason in matters of faith. In his controversial work The Religion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation (1638), Chillingworth argued that Scripture and reason, rather than ecclesiastical authority, should arbitrate religious belief. His defense of Protestantism against Catholic critiques centered on individual conscience and rational inquiry as essential for authentic faith.

Harrison uses Chillingworth to illustrate how the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical authority led to a reconfiguration of faith. By prioritizing rational inquiry, Chillingworth contributed to the intellectual climate that fostered instrumental reason—a development Harrison sees as both a strength and a limitation of the Reformation’s legacy. “The Protestant critique of implicit faith,” Harrison writes,

Represents the first articulation of a tightly connected set of principles that are now almost universally endorsed in the West: that individuals should be left to make up their own minds in the spheres of religion, morals, and politics; that claims about important matters of fact should not be taken on the basis of authority alone; that we have an obligation not to hold beliefs without being able to offer some kind of justification for them (85).

Harrison rightly notes that “reason” has always carried theological implications, tracing its divine associations from ancient Greek thought to early Christian theology. For the Greeks, reason was linked to the divine: Plato considered it the soul’s highest faculty, and Aristotle viewed the contemplative life as god-like (bios theoretikos). The Stoics emphasized the rational order of the cosmos (logos), which humans could apprehend through their rational capacities. Early Christian thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor built on these ideas, understanding human reason as a reflection of the imago Dei and dependent on divine illumination to grasp ultimate truth. This integration of reason and revelation created a harmony later reinterpreted and challenged during the Reformation and Enlightenment.

While modern readers may find the theological grounding of reason puzzling, Harrison attributes this to the present-day assumption of a stark divide between “natural” and “supernatural.” In the premodern worldview, the human soul was understood as porous to divine activity, making reason “deeply theologically inflected” (93). Early modern thinkers, such as Descartes, Malebranche, Charleton, and Cudworth, continued to ground reason in its divine origins, asserting that human rationality reflected God’s rational nature. Harrison notes, “The ultimate foundation of rational knowledge . . . continued to be God” (96).

However, the Protestant Reformers disrupted this harmony. Luther and Calvin, wary of reason’s corruption by sin, relegated it to secular and natural domains, reinforcing a dualism between faith and reason. Luther famously described reason as a “leprous whore,” expressing distrust in its ability to comprehend divine truths. Calvin, while less severe, also viewed reason as compromised by the Fall (101). He acknowledged its ability to discern aspects of the natural world and basic moral truths (sensus divinitatis), but denied its capacity for saving knowledge of God. Harrison broadens this discussion by connecting Protestant skepticism about reason to figures like Ockham and Pascal. Ockham’s nominalism and voluntarism, in particular, set the stage for a narrower understanding of reason that later influenced skeptical philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (106). Indeed, Harrison contends that Hobbes’s materialist philosophy, which reduced reality to mechanistic interactions of matter, extended Ockham’s rejection of metaphysical universals and led to a more secular framework of knowledge.

This intellectual trajectory is well-documented, and Harrison cites scholars such as Michael Allen Gillespie, John Milbank, Louis Dupré, and Thomas Pfau. “Nominalism, in combination with voluntarism, was thus destined to leave an indelible mark on subsequent theology, politics, and the natural sciences,” Harrison observes, “promoting a revised understanding of human reason” (106).

Harrison deepens this analysis by exploring the rise of “rational religion” during the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Locke and Paley sought to harmonize Christianity with rational inquiry, while Deists like Tindal and Paine argued that reason alone sufficed for religious truths. Rational religion emphasized natural theology and universal moral principles, downplaying traditional doctrines and mysteries. Harrison connects this movement to the intellectual culture of Diderot and d’Alembert and their Encyclopédie, which championed reason and empirical inquiry as tools for human progress, often at the expense of institutional religion.

The rise of instrumental reason thus afforded new forms of natural theology and rational proofs for God existence. Harrison returns to this discussion in a later part of his book, but in the final section of chapter three he examines the rise of “experimental natural philosophy,” which revisits themes from his previous work, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science and Fall of Man. He argues that the Protestant concept of “experiment,” tied to personal encounters with God, influenced empirical methodologies in early modern science. Figures like Boyle and Bacon rejected traditional authorities, emphasizing firsthand observation and verification. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in verba (“Take no one’s word for it”), encapsulated this ethos, mirroring the Protestant rejection of ecclesiastical mediation.

While early science retained theological motivations—Boyle, for instance, saw inquiry as an act of worship revealing God’s order—Harrison shows how this legacy of empirical rigor gradually distanced science from its religious roots. He extends this trajectory to the nascent social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology. Early thinkers like Max Weber and Émile Durkheim adapted Protestant frameworks of individual responsibility and empirical inquiry to study human society (126). This development, Harrison notes, carries an ironic twist: intellectual movements often seen as leading to secularization—such as the Enlightenment and the rise of the social sciences—drew heavily on theological innovations from the Reformation. By transforming religious authority rather than abandoning it, these movements perpetuated many Protestant concerns in secularized forms.

Harrison masterfully connects the Reformation’s theological shifts to the broader epistemological and cultural currents of modernity. His analysis of reason’s theological origins and its eventual secularization is particularly compelling, as is his exploration of the parallels between Protestant experimental religion and early scientific methodologies. By tracing these continuities, Harrison underscores how theological innovations laid the groundwork for some of modernity’s defining intellectual trajectories.

However, Harrison’s treatment of Protestantism would benefit from greater nuance. He often portrays Protestantism as a unified force driving these transformations, but as I have argued elsewhere, these developments are more accurately attributed to a specific stream of Protestant thought—namely, the liberal tradition emerging from the Elizabethan Settlement.[1] This version of Protestantism, a via media (“middle way”), prioritized compromise and adaptability, creating intellectual spaces where individual interpretation and rational inquiry could thrive. It was not Protestantism as a whole but this particular strain that most closely aligned with the cultural and epistemological shifts Harrison describes.

This narrowing of focus helps clarify the historical dynamics at play. The Elizabethan Settlement’s strategic balance between doctrinal authority and pragmatic tolerance fostered the intellectual pluralism that later fed into Enlightenment ideals. By generalizing Protestantism as a monolithic movement, Harrison risks obscuring the theological and cultural diversity within the Reformation and overlooking the unique contributions of specific contexts to the rise of instrumental reason and modern epistemology.

Harrison’s exploration of Protestantism’s intellectual legacy nevertheless offers profound insight into how deeply modernity is shaped by theological underpinnings. By exposing the religious roots of seemingly secular concepts, Harrison challenges the simplistic narrative of an irreconcilable rupture between religion and reason, instead offering a richly interwoven account of their shared history.

This discussion, however, is only the beginning. As Harrison moves beyond the Reformation’s influence, he probes into how these theological developments shaped the emergence of modern naturalism, with its triumphs and its pitfalls. In the next part of this review, I will examine Harrison’s analysis of the shifting boundaries between the “natural” and the “supernatural”—a distinction that would come to redefine the intellectual landscape of modernity. By historicizing these categories, Harrison invites readers to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about the secular age.

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