John Locke: explored and critiqued

Locke wrote his two influential political works during a time of social, religious and political upheaval in the 17th century. He lived during the English civil war, the beheading of Charles I, the Restoration and the crowning of William of Orange. In fact, “throughout his life men were but rarely unmoved by controversies of faith and of public duty” (Locke, 7). Locke was a puritan in the truest sense of the word; he desired to purify the Anglican Church and avoid schism and Protestant infighting. He was not a puritan separatist, but sought unity within Protestantism. His puritan upbringing, affirmation of the Anglican thirty-nine Articles, four years with the French Calvinist Huguenots and six years amongst the liberal-Calvinist Remonstrants in Holland, culminated in a strong desire for toleration among Protestant factions (Foster, 480-481). Locke was a theologian (Barton, 225) and as is custom among theologians, he wrote on a variety of subjects. His ideas do not fit neatly into categories of secular and sacred. Thus, to understand his political work, it must be studied in light of all his works (Reasonableness of Christianity, Essays and Notes on St. Paul’s Epistles, Letter Concerning Toleration, Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his Two Treatises on Government) and placed firmly within the long tradition of Calvinist political theory that gave rise to his thought. His ideas descend within the pale of covenant theology and Locke espoused a Christian worldview. He was not just a Christian, he was an apologist. He was not simply a Calvinist, he represented the first large step, in English puritan thought, away from the reformed faith in search of Christian principles founded on reason and not solely on revelation. He turned his back on mainstream Calvinist thought and looked forward, helping to usher in the Enlightenment.
James II ascended the throne with large amounts of support from the Tories and the Anglican Church; both the bishops in the House of Lords and the clergymen. The unwavering support came largely by the submission of the populace via the strong espousal of the divine right of kings (Dunning, 224-225); “the Duty of unresisting submission to the Lord’s anointed was kept before the English people in copious floods of sacerdotal literature” (Dunning, 224). The convocation of 1683 condemned “certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines destructive to the sacred persons of princes…among the doctrines thus condemned was that of the origin of civil government in popular contract of any sort” (Dunning, 224). This is the environment Locke found himself in. He fled abroad in 1683 when his long time friend and employer, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was accused in a plot to overthrow the King (Locke, 7). Locke did not return until the installation of William of Orange in 1689. Locke released his Treatises on Government to help justify William’s ascent (Morgan, 105-106).
Locke, like his American descendents, was concerned with the rights of Englishmen as they had long been established and handed down (Dunning 229,230) (Barton, 225)(Morgan, 105-106). “There is in Locke’s theory little that had not long been current coin in political philosophy” (Dunning, 229), it is also important to note that contrary to modern perception, Locke did not lead the espousal of republican ideals; rather the espousal of the Whig ideal of limited Monarchy (Dunning, 228).
Locke was concerned with how man knew things, epistemology, as much as what men thought. His “religion, no less and probably far more than the new science and new views of political authority deeply influenced Locke’s work” (Pearson, 247), though he was accused of being a deist by the extremely conservative Calvinist and hero of Puritan thought; John Edwards. Locke was a Christian Theologian, apologist (Locke, 8) and student of the continental magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century and their seventeenth century descendants. John Calvin sowed ideas in his institutes that grew in the minds of Beza, Holtman, Althusius, Richard Hooker and eventually Locke; which influenced the Dutch Declaration, Puritan Constitutional formulations in England, Scotland and the colonies by the “Calvinistic habit of embodying convictions in written form and working institutions” (Foster, 489). Protestant confessional documents articulated theological principles to embody their beliefs in their ecclesiastical magisteriam. In the same fashion, later Calvinist political thinkers formulated their constitutional documents to embody their beliefs in the Political Magisteriam (Foster, 489) as did Cromwell in the Instrument of Government, the Pilgrims Mayflower Compact (et.al. Eliot, 59-60, 106-118) and Locke’s involvement with the Carolina Constitution.
It is easy to define Locke’s role in political anthropology as secularizing covenant political theory; severing its ties from the firmer principles of Biblical Theology (Baker, 39). We find in Locke the turning point in Liberal Calvinist political thought. He begins what the founders of The United States perfected; the move away from explicit biblical formulations to implicit, assuming the Protestant worldview in the descendents of his thoughts. In philosophical formulations, most modern philosophers would be shocked to know “that so heavily did Locke draw from the Bible in developing his political theories, that in his first treatise on government, he invoked the Bible in one thousand three hundred and forty nine references” (Barton, 225).Without a background in the Bible and once his two Treaties on political thought are divorced from his other writings, it is easier to reconcile them with modern secular, political theory. “Both Locke and Hobbes created their theories on the bases of rational principle; neither appealed directly to tradition nor to biblical principles” (Baker, 37). The firm place of rationalism in modern political theory was founded by Hobbes and Locke (Baker, 2000) (Brogan, 79).
Without a fuller understanding of his explicit theological work, Locke’s natural law theories are confusing to modern Theocrats within Christianity, even so far as being anathema. While his influence on modern rationalistic formulations as the bedrock of political theory has descended from him and grown up into the abandonment of Meta-ethical formulations of rights. As Dr. Clayton points out, and is foundational to modern thought, it is difficult to found philosophical formulations on human nature and God because the two cannot be measured or established on empirical evidence. This gave rise to Mills Utilitarianism and is the foundational presupposition in modern political theory. Rawls states the principle; “public conceptions of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines…the public conception of justice is to be political, not metaphysical” (Rawls, 186) and Sandel states the application; “government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse” (Sandel, 224). The modern world has firmly set philosophical subjects in sacred and secular spheres.
The covenant that God made with Adam in the Garden has no weight in formulating the nature of public utility, nor do the formulations we make about the nature of the bread and wine in Communion effect the tacit agreement we have entered into as citizens. For Locke, it did and that separates him completely from Mills and Rawls. Locke’s understanding, as a Calvinist, of the Triune God informed his formulations, whether he explicitly stated it or not, because he lived in an age when one’s religion was all encompassing and his body of work expresses his view of the world, man and man’s political economy in light of the Protestant worldview. Though he sought to unify his faith and reason, he was influenced in all areas of life and understanding by his firm knowledge of his Eternal King.