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Unbelief, the Senses and the Body in Nicholas Bownde's The vnbeleefe of S. Thomas (1608)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2016

Patrick S. McGhee
Patrick S. McGhee*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
*E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Doubt and unbelief were central to the ways in which ministers and theologians in post-Reformation England thought and wrote about religion. Far from signalling spiritual failure, grappling with unbelief could be an important stage in developing the faith and religious understanding of the individual believer while establishing a role for physicality and the senses. Nicholas Bownde's The vnbeleefe of S. Thomas the Apostle, laid open for the comfort of all that desire to beleeue (1608) suggests that unbelief was relational and that belief required not only an acknowledgement of doubt but also extensive exploration of what doubtful and unbelieving experiences involved and how they were to be overcome. Bownde's work demonstrates that this ongoing spiritual conversation could make use of important scriptural examples such as the ‘Doubting Thomas’ episode in order to elucidate intimate theological problems for contemporary believers. This process suggests that early modern religion can only be properly understood with close reference to the role of doubt, unbelief and spiritual uncertainty in religious discourse because belief itself was predicated on the logical possibility of unbelief.

Keywords

Doubtunbeliefpractical divinitysensesSt Thomas
Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 266 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016 

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Footnotes

The online version of this article has been updated since original publication. A notice detailing the change has also been published.

References

1 Bownde, Nicholas, The Vnbeleefe of S. Thomas the Apostle, laid open for the comfort of all that desire to beleeue (Cambridge, 1608; London, 1628)Google Scholar; all references are to the 1608 edition.

2 Parker, Kenneth L. and Carlson, Eric Josef, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998), 90–1Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Dickens, Arthur G., Martin Luther and the Reformation (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar.

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9 Milner, Senses, 56–9, 186–7, 195–6.

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24 ODNB, s.n. ‘Bownd, Nicholas (d.1613)’, online edn (2012), at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3084>, accessed 25 August 2014.

25 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 25, cited in Hoffmann, ‘Atheism’, 50.

26 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 26, cited in Hoffmann, ‘Atheism’, 50.

27 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 1–2. I have been unable to identify the Bible translation used by Bownde.

28 Space precludes discussion of several other important themes which could prove fruitful in further research on the post-Reformation period. For example, the significance of spatiality, temporality, presence and absence in the scriptural text of the Thomas episode has been explored in considerable depth by Most, Doubting Thomas, 43–68.

29 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 1–2.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 For a discussion of conflicting early modern perspectives on whether Thomas did in fact touch Christ in the narrative, see Most, Doubting Thomas, 145–54.

33 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 1.

34 Ibid.

35 Alec Ryrie, ‘Faith, Doubt, and the Problem of Atheism in Reformation Britain’, paper presented to the History of Christianity seminar, Cambridge, 20 November 2013. I am indebted to the author for allowing me to make use of this paper.

36 Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 23.

37 Ibid. 23–4.

38 See also ibid. 21, 85.

39 Ibid. 87–8.

40 Ibid. 88.

41 Ibid. 90.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid. 93.

44 Ibid. 96–7.

45 Ibid. 101.

46 Ibid. 31–2.

47 Allen, ‘Nicholas Bownde’, 104 n. 85; Harley, David, ‘Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology, 1560–1660’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993), 396–435CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 400 n. 21.

48 Parker and Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’, 87–96.

49 As cited in Bownde, Vnbeleefe, 160–1.

50 Ibid. 162.

51 Ibid. 162–3.

52 Ibid. 155–6.

53 Ryrie, ‘Faith, Doubt, and the Problem of Atheism’. The close links between doubt, voluntarism and hostility towards atheism have also been explored by Hoffmann, ‘Atheism’.