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Are You Ahne Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era. By Susan E. Schreiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 499 pp. $74.00 (cloth).
The "desire for certitude," especially in religious matters, and the "recurring fear of deception" (p. viii) that intensified during the Reformation through the early modern era still preoccupies those of us "living at the end of modernity," Susan Schreiner writes in the preface to this volume analyzing the various epistemological and theological debates of the time. In the first chapter, Schreiner offers a tour de force discussion of the main interpretations of the transition from the Renaissance to early modernity provided by seminal figures such as Hans Blumenberg, Karsten Harries, Stephen Toulmin, and Louis Dupré. In Schreiners view, certainty is the theme which summarizes all the different currents of thought of the time and thus provides the interpretative lens of the entire work. Throughout the lengthy book she looks at different facets, mostly theological, of the ways theologians and some other thinkers manage to establish certainty.
The second chapter focuses on the issue of the certainty of salvation in the theologies of the great reformers. Schreiner observes that the role of the Holy Spirit undergoes an important shift at this point in time: whereas in medieval theology its role was to infuse charity into the soul, for the reformers the Spirit acquires the role of warranting the certainty of faith and salvation. For Luther, the only certainty of forgiveness and salvation comes through...