Igrejas e Estado

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare the long period of religious turbulence which marked the beginning of modernity, involving the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, with the current period in which the relationship between politics and religion has been redefined in another form. It will be shown that the greatest thinkers of modern political philosophy, from Machiavelli and Calvin to Hobbes and Milton, and from Spinoza to Bayle and Rousseau, had to decide on the relations between theology and politics. We will also examine the different politico-theological 'regimes' discussed by Rousseau at the end of his Social Contract (1762), comparing them with the different regimes relating Church and State formulated by the theologian of resistance to Nazism, Karl Barth, in a 1937 text.