The Theology of Liberalism

Eric Nelson has made it an ongoing mission to excavate the pipelines that run between modern theories of justice and late-medieval Christianity. This latest work explores the connection between contemporary liberalism and the resurgence of Pelagian thought in the sixteenth century. Nelson posits that the protoliberal thinkers, from Milton to Kant, developed the modern concept of liberty as a solution to “theodicy,” the apparent enigma that surrounds the coexistence of divine justice and human suffering. Pelagian theology, which dates to the fourth century (and against which Augustine promoted doctrines like original sin and divine voluntarism), stipulates two positions that together answer the theodicy dilemma—first, that justice stands as an entity independent of God, and second, that humans have free will. Only a “human capacity for morality,” goes the logic, could vindicate the justice of God, because a rational, benevolent divinity would never permit the unfree to suffer consequences over which they had no meaningful control. Nelson offers a vivid account of protoliberal interventions into these controversies. Not only theologians like Archbishop Laud, but philosophers like Locke and Rousseau emerge as Pelagian divines.

Divinity · Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Liberalism · Morality · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Theodicy · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy