William J. Bulman is an ambitious, coming historian. He advocates nothing less than a new “general framework” for a “balanced reconsideration of God in the Enlightenment” (4), an objective toward which, in fact, many scholars have been working for quite some time, not least Dale K. Van Kley, whose sparkling afterword has a different tempo to Bulman’s no less acute but densely textured (some might say chewy) introductory essay. Bulman wants the Enlightenment to be decoupled from Spinoza (and from Jonathan Israel) and located more directly in relationship to the Reformation, to become, it seems at times, almost a seventeenth-century phenomenon (though Bulman distances himself from any Hazardian rerun). It was born of an overriding recognition by states and ministers of the need to preserve civil peace, and for moderate, enlightened values to be less about toleration than to constitute a form of civil (and civilized) religion, preferably Christian in expression. And he is even brave enough to state what the Enlightenment was not, including radical in its early manifestations in the Dutch Republic, where disputes over biblical exegesis within confessions counted for more than philosophical rationalism outside them.

Bulman claims the chapters “offer crucial support” for the approach he outlines (21). They certainly go some way toward doing so. In a key essay, Brad S. Gregory demands a longer historical trajectory for Enlightenment discussion of the deity and sees in its conflation of God with his creation a confusion that had its origins in late medieval intellectual assumptions and the doctrinal disagreements of the Reformation. J. C. D. Clark agrees, in his paper on the divine attributes (of God the Father) and the question of categories, that the understanding of God’s nature advanced by Deists from Herbert of Cherbury to Paine “had long been available” (215). In this latest attempt to dismantle the false teleologies and genealogies that prefigure the advent of secularity, Clark rather presumes the equation of civil society with majority Christian opinion in Britain. It could be an unsettling combination for the church(es). Justin Champion sets out Hobbes’s defense of a civil religion, one that would preserve church institutions while achieving a “neutering of the divine” (43); Anton Matytsin argues for a shift in French apologetics of ca. 1730–60 toward defenses of the faith in response to perceived atheism that were based predominantly on natural rather than revealed theology and, as such, could be deemed supportive of civil society. The cost was high: the abandonment of efforts to prove the truth of Christianity. Clergy and laity were left to deal as best they could with providential uncertainty, the theme of Jonathan Sheehan’s richly textured essay “Suffering Job,” a figure turned, he plausibly contends, into “an historical everyman” (193) by Warburton and others. And this uncertainty was in itself likely to render precarious the consensual, civil religion increasingly endorsed. Paul Lin finds in the attempts by the French Protestant Souverain and the Anglican Stephen Nye to make Augustine a different sort of Trinitarian a good instance of that reinvention of primitive Christian faith that was in vogue ca. 1700. Such views, advanced in earnest, were both heterodox and subversive and were a thin foundation for civil equilibrium. Progressive Christian scholars like Richard Bentley sniffed them out in mainstream textual locations. Sarah Ellenzweig charts his underlying anxieties in his edition of Paradise Lost that Milton was a reader of materialist heterodoxy received via Spinoza.

By any standard, this is a fine collection of essays, anchored in the second half of the seventeenth century and also reflecting the global turn in Enlightenment studies, here represented in essays by Joan-Pau Rubiés on libertine readings of Hinduism and Claudia Brosseder making the case through the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo for the start of the early Spanish American Enlightenment in Peru. Bulman admits to differences between the contributors, and candidly lays out the varying (arguably unreconcilable) perspectives and values of a Champion and a Gregory. Despite the grail of a new, consensual general framework that the editors want to construct, it is hard not to conclude that the best ticket remains what Bulman calls Van Kley’s “ultimately pragmatist” (33) approach, one in which Enlightenment is at once unitary and pluralized.