My article at VoegelinView

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Last week the online journal VoegelinView published an article I submitted about John Locke’s religious views. My post here on Leo Strauss’s reading of Locke is a sort of companion piece to what I wrote for the VV. Suffice it to say there is a huge misunderstanding about John Locke, with both political and religious implications.

Thanks to columnist Lee Trepanier for suggesting that might submit my thoughts, and to editor Paul Krause.  Paul published my article despite being of a very different opinion personally, which shows a commitment to intellectual openness. 

There is an LDS angle in the article, in that I feel Locke came to a lot of views that are very close to the LDS theological positions. I find that intriguing. I am also interested in Locke’s Christian rationalism. I would like to elaborate more on this topic at some point. Here is a paragraph from my article:

In partial defense of Leo Strauss, Christian rationalism in the style of John Locke is all but dead today and remains almost incomprehensible. Locke’s rationalism maintained a belief in miracles and the supernatural, including Christ’s atoning sacrifice and resurrection, and relied on the authority of the Bible, though distrusting the conclusions of extra-biblical traditions and creeds. This approach may be exceptional. Most attempts at Christian rationalism today and in the past have fall into one of two failure modes. On one hand, the largest portion of once-Christian rationalism has devolved into faithlessness and within a generation or two ended up rejecting even the idea of revealed truth. On the other hand, many attempts at Christian rationalism are incapable of breaking new ground or uncovering new ideas because they are understandably and even commendably unwilling to cross certain lines of tradition that have defined orthodoxy for so long. It might very well be true that a Lockean style of Christian rationalism is inherently unstable and impractical – that if pursued for long enough it will inevitably fall to one side or the other. And yet, this exceptional, metastable, non-equilibrium superposition of the faithful and the heterodox, the Christian and the rationalist, is the only reading of Locke that really makes sense.

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