It was the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth who coined the concept of “philosophy of religion” in his magisterial opus magnum of 1678 entitled The True Intellectual System of the Universe. A year later, Henry More published his three-volume Latin Opera Omnia. Its second volume contains his principal philosophicalwritings in Latin, including his hugely influential critiques of Descartes, Spinoza and Boehme and his handbooks on ethics and metaphysics. Drawing upon the resources of the ancient theology of pagan and patristic Platonism, Cudworth and More were the founders of the modern discipline of the philosophy of religion. In response to the threat of materialism and determinism, the Cambridge Platonists propounded an early modern system of rational theology based upon the twin pillars of divine goodness and free will, thereby inaugurating a living tradition of Anglo-Saxon idealism.
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