The explosive transition ignited by the Protestant Reformation initiates, in the eonic account, the modern period, once again with a frontier effect, resulting in a great new age of history, this time with the elements of the sacred and the secular transformed and transcended in a new recasting (which we tend to call a secular society). It is hard to see the resemblance at first between the Protestant Reformation and the Israelite transition, but a careful analysis shows the way both ignite a period of rapid religious change, although in the case of the Reformation the later development leads to the period of the Enlightenment. That the period of the Israelite transition climaxed also in a period of Enlightenment (so to speak) and rationalized religion (for its time, and in the context of the devolved chaos of polytheism) is not obvious at first sight to a secularist. We tend to forget in the secularist clamor against 'religion' that that transition was a similar clamor against 'religion' as then known, and demanded a reform of 'god talk' in its corruptions. The point to see here is that the rationalization of religion is characteristic of both transitions, leaving behind the religious formations of an older era as it enters a new age of innovation. We have to leave it at that. Between Luther, Marx, and Spinoza, indeed of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and many others, the state of religion is transformed into new understandings that both reexpress yet move beyond the crystallized religions inherited from the Axial Age. 

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