The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I put some posts up on Medium , continuing my research on Locke and Strauss, focusing on Locke’s natural law theory. I called his ideas of Christian natural law and liberalism the Lockean Twins. The two provide checks and balances against each other in a society - wisdom balancing freedom, and a tendency to err on the side of freedom to balance human fallibility in achieving and agreeing upon the wisdom. But natural law considerations have been stripped from positive law and public administration in the 20th century. The result has been a loss of common sense and an increase in absurdity. Here, I will follow those posts up with some sketchy thoughts on what might be done. I have some relevant long-term predictions on the future in a previous post, but in the present I contemplate a more activist approach. I am not sure whether I am being absurd or serious, maybe both. Writing this gives me a feeling like what the old Marxist cultural theorists must have felt in their scheming against ...

The 20th century saw a little-understood but radical transformation of political and legal philosophy in the United States. From the Founding until the 20th century, the political philosophy of John Locke was highly influential, especially what I call the Lockean twins of Christian natural law and classical liberalism. The two provided checks and balances on each other, with the societal ideals of virtue and freedom as guiding stars. This system had its flaws, as with any human innovation, but resulted in tremendous social and economic growth in the United States, making it the most prosperous and thriving nation in history. The natural law or common sense approach which sought the good was attacked and eroded in the postmodern 20th century, with a complete non-democratic overhaul of legal philosophy and interpretation in the 1960s that replaced common sense natural law and "the good" with radical viewpoint neutrality. Today, secular liberalism unchecked by natural law has mo...

 (Cross-posted at Medium ) We are starting a period of descent from the exalted heights of peak Western Civilization. Andrew Potter’s  On Decline gives a rationalist’s perspective on civilization and decline with a conflicted attitude toward the West’s great civilizing force, Christianity. He wants the kind of civilization made possible only by Christianity, but without the religion itself. I call this conflict the Rationalist’s Conundrum. Voltaire recognized the problem. It’s what animated Nietzsche’s madman, and what made one of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. I picked up a copy of Andrew Potter’s book because the title was catchy and a feeling of decline is sort of in the air around us. As Roger Scruton quipped in in  Culture Counts  (2007), “Announcing its own demise has been … an enduring mark of Western civilization.” Putting aside Spengler, Toynbee, Carrol Quigley, Mancur Olson, and many others, the most recent conversation on decline was kicked off by Tyle...

Ok, so I will admit that I followed the link at Marginal Revolution to the ChatGPT AI language model and played around for a few minutes. It seems like the model has a hard-coded relativistic philosophy of truth - or at least of religion - and it is also hard-coded to deny that it could be biased toward any philosophy at all, which is obviously absurd. I use the word “hard-coded” incorrectly, I’m sure, having no knowledge of how the model actually works. I suppose there aren’t any larger lessons to be learned from this, other than the fact that it is useful to be aware of the philosophies that subconsciously influence our way of thinking. And it helps to be aware of one’s own biases. These feats are obviously not possible for this language model. We started with some conversation about baseball and then I turned to religion.  Me:  Do all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints go to Heaven when they die? ChatGPT:  Members of the Church of Jesus Christ...

One of the doctrines that differentiates my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from mainstream Christianity is the doctrine of eternal progression, or becoming like God. I think all Christians accept that through Christ’s grace He can make us more like Him, although the nature of that gift can be understood in different ways.  For example, John 14:20 says "At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." In John 10:34 Christ says "Ye are Gods," quoting Psalms. Paul teaches in Romans 8:16-17 "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together." These scriptures are moving and powerful, but of course can be interpreted in different ways. The teachings of modern prophets guide us to take these doctrines more literally than is typical...

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 ...

Leo Strauss It is no secret that I am a fan of John Locke. I stole this blog’s name from the title of one of his books, after all. I am very impressed and inspired by his unique and refreshing combination of clear-headed reason and reliance on faith and scripture. I have to say I was a little dismayed and surprised when I saw that many or most political commentators today see John Locke as an atheist / deist / secularist, following the “Straussian” reading of Locke. This so strongly contradicted everything that I saw in my reading of Locke that it was quite baffling, and I felt a need to figure out what was going on. The Reasonableness of Christianity was the first of John Locke’s works that I came across (see my thoughts here ), as my interests (outside of my day job) are essentially Christian and religious. I found in Locke a scholar who taught that Christian revelation is not just reasonable, but that Christian religion is the best and only foundation for true reason. Locke wrot...