Where spiritual indifference reigned supreme: Bishop Butler and the age of reason

In the eighteenth century, when many in England were tempted to replace traditional Christian faith by a vaguely speculative belief in a Supreme Being, it was Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion that exposed the fallacy of fashionable deism. He restored to Anglican thinking the centrality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For this reason he believed that the natural features of the Christian faith (its scriptures, history, hierarchy, liturgy, buildings) are an incarnation of its spiritual identity as the Body of Christ. Not only in his written work as a scholar, but also in his pastoral practice as a bishop, he was an effective witness to this incarnational belief.