First published in 1700, The Christian¿s Reasonable Service (De Redelijke Godsdienst) ran through twenty Dutch editions in the eighteenth century alone! The title is derived from Romans 12:1, ¿I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.¿ It expresses what God requires from man, and particularly from the Christian, that he serve Him in Spirit and in truth¿intelligently, rationally, and in harmony with and response to God¿s revelation of Himself, His Word. With a decidedly Puritan flavor and representing Reformed experiential religion at its best, Wilhelmus à Brakel systematically moves through the major doctrines of the Bible in hopes of seeing the minds of God¿s people renewed for the purpose of promoting godliness. Throughout his work, but particularly in the practical application of each doctrine, à Brakel strives unceasingly to exalt the name of Jesus as the name that the Father has given above every other name¿there being no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
"The topics of church and state, religious toleration, the legal enforcement of religious practices, and religiously motivated violence on the part of individuals, have once again become burning issues. Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary was a major attempt to deal with very similar problems three centuries ago. His argument is that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God cannot have intended." "Bayle has often been seen as a skeptic who blazed a philosophical path that Denis Diderot, David Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers would follow. But his was a philosophical skepticism that did not exclude the possibility of religious faith, and Bayle himself was a Calvinist Christian." "Bayle's book was translated into English in 1708. The Liberty Fund edition reprints that translation, carefully checked against the French and corrected, with an introduction and annotations designed to make Bayle's arguments accessible to the twenty-first-century reader." --Book Jacket.
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