How to be a Puritan Atheist

00:00 // Introduction: Doubt vs. Anger in Pre-Modern Unbelief
02:15 // John Earle's Sceptic: The Agonised Doubter
05:30 // Women and the Crisis of Faith: Hidden Voices
08:45 // Predestination Anxiety: Am I Saved?
13:00 // Hannah Allen: Despair, Damnation and the Devil
19:10 // From Despair to Atheism: The Vicious Circle
24:30 // John Bunyan and the Flood of Blasphemous Thoughts
30:00 // The Bible Under Scrutiny: Textual Doubt
36:20 // Fighting Back: Arguments, Nature and the Witness of Creation
44:00 // How Protestant Doubt Laid the Foundations of Modern Unbelief

Early ‘atheism’ did not always mean angry rejection of religion. The most earnest believers were often ones who wrestled most seriously with doubts.

This lecture will look at how and why Christians in the seventeenth century first began seriously to wrestle with unbelief, whether troubled by feelings that God was absent, worries about religious variety or fear of damnation. What made these doubts so powerful was that their roots were not philosophical, but emotional.

This lecture was recorded by Alec Ryrie on the 14th March 2019

Alec Ryrie was Gresham Professor of Divinity. He is also Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Co-Editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and President of the Church of England Record Society. From 2015-17 he was Visiting Professor in the History of Religion at Gresham College and gave two series of lectures on the history of Protestant Christianity. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

He studied History as an undergraduate, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before completing a Master's in Reformation Studies at St. Andrews and a D.Phil. in Theology at St. Cross College, Oxford. From 1999-2006 he taught at the University of Birmingham, moving to Durham in 2007. He was Head of the Department of Theology and Religion from 2012-15 and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow from 2015-18. He is on the editorial boards of St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate) and the Royal Historical Society's New Historical Perspectives. Since 1997 he has been a Reader in the Church of England, and he is licenced to the parish of Shotley St. John (diocese of Newcastle).

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/puritan-atheist

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