John Locke's religious interests and concerns permeate his philosophical production and are best expressed in his later writings on religion, which represent the culmination of his studies. In this volume, Diego Lucci offers a thorough analysis and reassessment of Locke's unique, heterodox, internally coherent version of Protestant Christianity, which emerges from The Reasonableness of Christianity and other public as well as private texts. In order to clarify Locke's views on morality, salvation, and the afterlife, Lucci critically examines Locke's theistic ethics, (...) biblical hermeneutics, reflection on natural and revealed law, mortalism, theory of personal identity, Christology, and tolerationism. While emphasizing the originality of Locke's scripture-based religion, this book calls attention to his influences and explores the reception of his unorthodox theological ideas. Moreover, the book highlights the impact of Locke's natural and biblical theology on other areas of his thought, thus enabling a better understanding of the unity of his work. (shrink)

Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity resulted not only from his agnosticism on substance, but also from his biblical theology. This theory was intended to complement and sustain Locke’s moral and theological commitments to a system of otherworldly rewards and sanctions as revealed in Scripture. Moreover, he inferred mortalist ideas from the Bible, rejecting the resurrection of the same body and maintaining that the soul dies at physical death and will be resurrected by divine miracle. Accordingly, personal identity is neither (...) in the soul, nor in the body, nor in a union of soul and body. To Locke, personal identity is in consciousness, which, extending “backwards to any past Action or Thought,” enables the self, both in this life and upon resurrection for the Last Judgment, to recognize that “it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done” (Essay II.xxvii.9). (shrink)

This essay explores the idea of experience and its epistemological and practical role in maintaining the health of a household among early modern English Royalists. A number of prominent royalists during the mid-seventeenth century British Civil Wars expended quite some effort in the collection of medical recipes, including Queen Henrietta Maria herself, as well as William and Margaret Cavendish, and the Talbot sisters—Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Howard. This essay looks at these Royalists and four of their collections: three published (Henrietta (...) Maria, Grey, Howard), and one manuscript (the Caven­dishes), in order to determine how they conceptualized experience and its role in medical practice. The claim that such recipe collections represent a new, anti-Aristotelian idea of experience as a specific, particular event is disputed through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these collections. Instead, it is argued that there a number of related conceptions of experience found in these Royalist recipe collections, but the basic idea is one where experience indicates long experience or expertise, an idea that can traced back at least to humanist medicine of the Renaissance, and likely back to Galen. (shrink)

This article investigates the growth and decline of the use of the ante-Nicene Fathers in relation to Trinitarian issues in seventeenth-century Anglican apologetics. Anglican apologists referred to the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers as the earliest and most reliable testimonies of Christianity contra what they perceived as Popish, Puritan, and Socinian corruptions of the true religion. On the other hand, Catholic, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian polemicists stigmatized the incompatibility of the ante-Nicenes’ writings with the Trinitarian dogma formulated at Nicaea and elaborated (...) by the post-Nicene Fathers. In response, several Church of England divines attempted to defend their engagement with the ante-Nicene Fathers from the criticisms of Catholic, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian polemicists, which exposed their use of the ante-Nicenes in Trinitarian matters to the charge of priestcraft. The historical narratives employed by Anglican apologists ultimately proved ineffective, and even provided various heterodox thinkers, such as John Toland, with additional arguments against the Trinitarian dogma. (shrink)

In the early 1740s, one book caused turmoil and debate among the English cultural elites of the time. Entitled Christianity Not Founded on Argument, it was attributed to Henry Dodwell the Younger (1706-1784). This book went through four editions between 1741 and 1746, and the controversy that followed its publication involved some of the major figures of English religious thought in the mid-eighteenth century. Dodwell purposely led a skeptical attack on any sort of rational theology, including deistic doctrines of natural (...) religion, which identified ‘true’ religion with the outcomes of unprejudiced, rational inquiry, and Boylean and Newtonian physico-theologies, which aimed at proving God’s existence and the veracity of Christian revelation by combining physico-mathematical rationality with traditional theological concepts. In fact, Dodwell called attention to the limits and inadequacies of human reason and, hence, to the impossibility of achieving religious truth by either reflecting on human nature and morality (as most deists used to do) or investigating the physical world (as several freethinkers, most prominently the deist and pantheist John Toland, and such physico-theologians as Boyle, Newton and their followers did). On the other hand, Dodwell did not openly reject Christianity and, instead, he claimed to be a defender of fideism. However, his observations on the Scriptures, religious education and the de jure divino (divine right) institutions of the Church and the Christian state were extremely ambiguous. For this reason, his book received a variety of reactions in the more than twenty replies that followed its publication. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on miracles in Enlightenment England shows the composite and evolutionary character of the English Enlightenment and, more generally, of the Enlightenment’s relation to religion. In fact, that debate saw the confrontation of divergent positions within the Protestant field and led several deists and freethinkers to resolutely deny the possibility of “things above reason” (i.e. things that, according to such Protestant philosophers as Robert Boyle and John Locke, human reason can neither comprehend nor refute, and that humanity must (...) thus receive as supernatural). In their attacks on miracles, the deists adopted various strategies, which can be classified in two main groups. On the one hand, Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, and Peter Annet, although employing different concepts of reason and having different views of God and nature, rejected miracles on the basis that God is unable to contravene the eternal, immutable, and mechanical laws of nature. On the other, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and Thomas Morgan, whose theories on natural religion presented striking similarities, saw God as unwilling to interpose in human or natural affairs. They shunned the possibility of miraculous events while simultaneously acknowledging the presence and efficacy of divine providence in the government of the universe. In other words, they considered God as the active governor of the universe, rather than a distant and inert clockmaker removed from his Creation, but they held that God would not suspend the laws of nature, in which his impartial wisdom, forethought, and goodness found perfect expression. (shrink)

After the publication of The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), several critics depicted Locke as a follower of the anti-Trinitarian and anti-Calvinist theologian Faustus Socinus and his disciples, the Polish Brethren. The relation between Locke and Socinianism is still being debated. Locke’s religion indeed presents many similarities with the Socinians’ moralist soteriology, non-Trinitarian Christology, and mortalism. Nevertheless, Locke’s theological ideas diverge from Socinianism in various regards. Furthermore, there are significant differences between the Socinians’ and Locke’s views on the natural and revealed (...) law. Socinian authors thought that Christ’s Gospel had superseded both the Law of Nature and the Mosaic Law. Therefore, they endeavored to follow the Christian imperative of non-violence and favored pacifism. Moreover, they maintained the divine origin of political authority and asserted absolute obedience to the magistrate, thereby rejecting the right to resistance and revolution to the political power. Conversely, Locke argued that first the Law of Moses and then the Christian Law of Faith had restated the God-given, eternally valid, and universally binding Law of Nature, which Christ had complemented with revealed truths concerning the afterlife and divine mercy. Thus, according to Locke, under the Christian covenant the protection of the self ’s and others’ natural rights from abusive individuals or oppressive rulers is still a right and a duty to the Divine Creator and Legislator. (shrink)

Nowadays, more than three centuries after John Locke’s affirmation of the separation between state and church, confessional systems of government are still widespread and, even in secular liberal democracies, politics and religion often intermingle. As a result, some ecclesiastical institutions play a significant role in political affairs, while minority groups and individuals having alternative worldviews, values, and lifestyles are frequently discriminated against. Locke’s theory of religious toleration undeniably has some shortcomings, such as the exclusion of Roman Catholics and atheists from (...) toleration and an emphasis on organized religion in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). However, Locke’s theory of toleration, which presents a Christian’s defense of the civil rights of those who have different religious opinions, still provides powerful arguments for the oft-neglected separation of politics from institutional religion, thereby urging us to leave theological dogmas and ecclesiastical authorities out of political life. (shrink)