ABSTRACT
In the early 1740s, the book Christianity Not Founded on Argument caused a controversial debate in England. According to Dodwell's portrayal of Christian fideism, humanity can know of God's grace only through a religious education based on the Scriptures. Christianity Not Founded on Argument was an original book in a time when the theological debate in England was particularly complex a time that saw the last phase of the deist controversy, the emergence of evangelicalism and various forms of fideism. Dodwell's pamphlet made a powerful impact on the minds of several important religious thinkers in England in the mid eighteenth century, particularly among Methodists, Presbyterians and other Nonconformists. Law's stress on the limits of human reason and Butler's defence of the biblical revelation rejected the deists' theories on the primacy of reason in religious matters and on the need to subject revelation to the judgement of reason.
