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grounded in alternative historical conceptions, and Bacon's tale enabled sci-
ence to piggyback on this effort. Protestants could not insist that Christian
teaching ought to be circumscribed by the Bible without also proposing a
revised understanding of church history. Having rejected the centuries-old
tradition which regarded the church itself as the ultimate arbiter of religious
truth, they also needed to regard the entire epoch of Catholic dominance
as a detour from providential history and the advent of the Reformation as
the restoration of the course that God had truly ordained. Bacon jumped
on board in his New Atlantis by projecting these historical conceptions upon
an imaginary past. His is a “what if” tale. It imagines an isolated Christian
world that had not followed the Catholic Church into its Babylonian exile,
and through this it models science's place in the different course of histori-
cal development that Protestants were now envisioning.
In this regard Bacon's fable fleshes out the historical implications of the
two topics doctrine. If faithfulness to the topic of God's word was needed
to keep the church on the course of providence, then faithfulness to the
topic of God's works was necessary as well. And this meant that a truly
reformed church was destined for science.
If we go back for a moment to the beginning of the Reformation early in
the previous century, we can locate the logical inertia that leads from Prot-
estantism's renewed emphasis on the Bible to the new historical conscious-
ness that Bacon had now tapped into. Martin Luther had objected to the
sale of indulgences in 1517 because this practice was at odds with the plain
reading of Scripture, which showed that salvation was by faith alone and
not by works of any kind. The local theologians who were soon called upon
to refute this renegade monk countered with a different reading of St. Paul
that had the backing of the church's interpretive traditions. This turned the
debate into a contest about interpretive authority and implicitly suggested
Luther's rejection of Catholic authority. This had not been his intention
when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses, and the radical implications of his
Bible-only stance might have just as easily been overlooked. But the heavy-
handed response of the Dominican John Eck, professor at Ingolstadt in
Bavaria, who charged this lowly Augustinian with heresy, forced him to
enlarge the argumentative scope of this premise. Luther now proposed that
the dictates of individual conscience alone should arbitrate such interpre-
tive differences and that the proposals of religious authorities that violated
such convictions (even those of popes) must be rejected. 1
On this principle, when Leo X formally declared him a heretic in the
bull Exsurge Domine of 1520, Luther merely reversed the accusation. But
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