Descartes and Modern Theology

Descartes’s philosophy is widely considered to have shaped a long period of subsequent thinking in philosophy and in theology. The philosopher himself wrote about God, was a Roman Catholic but shaped a philosophy that had, according to some, typical Protestant features. Therefore, theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had more than one reason to study and evaluate Descartes’s ideas. This chapter considers a number of Roman Catholic and Protestant systematic theologians from the twentieth century onward who wrote chapters on Descartes or for whose doctrinal reflections Descartes was a significant voice.