Alfred Loisy's ‘Firmin’ articles applied John Henry Newman's concept of development of doctrine within church history to the Bible. In doing this, Loisy was attempting to convince his Catholic audience to appropriate the historical critical method within Catholic biblical interpretation. Loisy attempted to explain the notion of development within the Bible, which had become commonplace among the Protestant historical critical scholarship of the time, in light of Newman's concept of the development of doctrine within history.

Asad explains, "During the period [early Middle Ages] the very term religious was therefore reserved for those living in monastic communities; with the later emergence of nonmonastic orders, the term came to be used for all who had taken lifelong vows by which they were set apart from the ordinary members of the Church" (39n22). Writing further, he mentions, "For medieval Christians, religion was not a universal phenomenon: religion was a site on which universal truth was produced, and it was clear to them that truth was not produced universally" (45n29). St. Thomas Aquinas used religio in his Summa Theologiae in I-II.49-55 and II-II.81.7-8 to refer to the reverence for God habitually developed within the church's communal liturgical practices. See St.

The early modern political philosopher Thomas Hobbes played a foundational role in the emergence of modern biblical criticism. An examination of his work on the Bible in his Leviathan shows how his exegesis supported his political agenda. The political context to Hobbes' biblical criticism shaped the way in which he read the Bible, and the method he espoused was an attempt to politicize the modern biblical critical project. Specifically, Hobbes wished to take the Bible out of the hands of the theologians, and place it in the hands of state-appointed officials. Following Hobbes, early modern politics continued to shape modern biblical criticism in later centuries.

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