Was Leo Strauss Wrong about John Locke?

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Stone
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Theological Language ◽  
English Politics ◽  
The Church ◽  
Cambridge School

Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.

Marvell and the Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-143
Author(s):  
Philip Connell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Central Component ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Marvell’s hostility to the Church of England was a matter of faith for his clerical antagonists during his lifetime, and soon became a central component of his posthumous reputation. The present chapter re-examines this aspect of Marvell’s writings, which are contextualized with reference to the poet’s family background and the broader fortunes of the established Church in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Marvell’s complex and shifting political allegiances during the 1640s and 1650s had significant implications for his views on ecclesiastical settlement, but throughout the interregnal period he remained broadly in favour of a reformed national church establishment, in tacit opposition to the views of godly republicans such as John Milton and Henry Vane. This commitment survived, mutatis mutandis, into the Restoration period, and coloured Marvell’s support for a policy of ecclesiastical comprehension. Only with the king’s abandonment of that policy, and apparent surrender to the forces of intolerance, did Marvell come to identify the corruptions of the Church of England with the threat of arbitrary government on the part of the Stuart court.

The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740) Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

The British theological world was stirred at the beginning of the eighteenth century by what the learned and staunchly orthodox Presbyterian historian James Seaton Reid has called “latitudinarian notions on the inferiority of dogmatic belief and the nature of religious liberty.” In the 1690s John Locke had published his Reasonableness of Christianity and Letters on Toleration, followed by John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious. In 1710 “Honest Will” Whitson, Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was expelled from the University for embracing Arian views. His departure was accompanied by rumors—long since substantiated—about his great predecessor's heterodox theology. Traditional theologians were shocked next by the appearance of Dr. Samuel Clark's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity which resulted in the author's arraignment before Convocation of the Church of England in 1714. The very same year John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, was first tried before the General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church for teaching Arian and Pelagian errors. In 1729, after three more trials, Simson was suspended from his professorship for denying the numerical oneness of the Trinity. Fierce doctrinal contentions also began to occupy English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, erupting during the famous Salters’ Hall meeting early in 1719.

English Puritans, Dissenters, Quakers, and Recusants

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
State Institution ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Church

The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 formally reestablished the Church of England as a state institution defined by standardized forms of worship and obedience to the Queen as its supreme governor. A vocal opposition almost immediately emerged, however, with responses to the settlement ranging from wary conformity or assertive nonconformity on the part of Puritans to Catholic refusal to attend church (a decision known as recusancy) to the emergence of more extreme separatist groups which would give rise to dissenters in the next century. The conflicting intentions and social identities of these groups, in addition to their connection to larger political developments, have made this one of the more tangled areas of English historiography, with the Puritanism bearing most of the burden. In the 19th century, for example, historians such as S. R. Gardiner equated puritanism with liberty and freedom; in the early 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber famously argued that modern capitalism was directly related to a Calvinist (and particularly English Calvinist) form of Christianity, with the Puritan divine Richard Baxter one of its foremost exponents. Such a view was criticized by, among others, Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Katherine George, who, nevertheless, imposed their own somewhat reified concepts onto nonmainstream groups. Recent years have witnessed such scholars as Patrick Collinson and Peter Lake exploring puritanism’s relation to the Elizabethan and early Stuart church and society, while David Como represents a new generation of historians, in this case focused on radicalism within the movement’s underground. This article attempts to encapsulate these trends, though its emphasis on English nonconformity admittedly excludes the new transatlantic focus promoted by historians such as Francis Bremer, or in the case of recusants, transcontinental perspectives. For such a perspective, see the Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History article on Protestantism by Carla Gardina Pestana.

JOHN LOCKE, ‘MATTERS INDIFFERENT’, AND THE RESTORATION OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE ROSE
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Church

John Locke is famous for his liberal and tolerationist works, published in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which attacked the belligerent intolerance of the Restoration Church of England. But his early writings, the Two tracts on government, were composed in the period between 1660 and 1662 when the details of the church settlement were the subject of heated debate. The thought of the young Locke defended an uncompromising settlement which would rigidly enforce uniformity in religious worship and secure the restored monarchy from clerical subversion. Whilst scholars have previously focused on the changes in Locke's thought from royalist Anglicanism to whig toleration, this article focuses on the Tracts in their own right. By placing them in the context of the Restoration debate on adiaphora, ceremonial ‘matters indifferent’, the typicality or otherwise of Locke's early thought can be discerned. This article argues that the legalistic understanding of adiaphora meant that this debate touched on political authority and obedience as well as theological questions, not least because matters indifferent fell under the purview of the monarch as supreme governor of the church.

Pressure-Group Politics and the Church of England: the Church Defence Institution 1859–1896

1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. D. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Pressure Group ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
Group Politics ◽  
English Politics ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of political mobilisation for religious organisations. This is a well-established fact in the case of English nonconformity – not quite such a well-established fact in the case of the Established Church. My concern in this paper is to trace the response of the Church of England to the extension of electoral politics, a response chiefly evidenced in the work of the Church Institution. This body, founded in 1859 and reconstructed as the Church Defence Institution in 1871, survived until 1896 as the most important independent pressure group acting on behalf of the Established Church in English politics.

‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)

2011 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 270-283
Author(s):  
Sarah Scutts
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Polemic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.

Country Matters: The Growth of Political Stability a Quarter-Century On

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma Landau
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constitutional Conventions ◽  
The Government ◽  
English Politics ◽  
The Church

Like Professor Roberts, I, too, think that re-evaluation of J. H. Plumb's The Growth of Political Stability, 1625-1725 poses interesting questions. However, unlike Professor Roberts, I do not think that the scholarship of the past quarter-century has undermined the foundations of Plumb's book. In large part, our assessments differ because we interpret Plumb's book differently. Roberts questions Plumb's identification of the structures that stabilized English politics; but Roberts does not present Plumb's diagnosis of what had been destabilizing English politics, and why. I consider that diagnosis the foundation of Plumb's book, for I read Plumb as arguing that the government of independent gentlemen—even if it be government by independent gentlemen—is no easy matter. How to govern effectively without arousing the ire of those whose autonomy effective central government would inevitably infringe? How to avoid attracting the enmity of powerful landowners, of merchants with power of their own, and of a populace with an experience of rebellion egregious even for seventeenth-century Europe? Roberts does not argue with Plumb's diagnosis of the causes of instability. However, his own solution to that problem implies that Plumb's book is ill-founded, for Roberts never mentions the problems intrinsic to governing the independent. Instead, he proposes that England achieved stability because English politicians elaborated constitutional conventions that subordinated the monarch to Parliament, and because the Church of England no longer had to fear for its existence. Roberts is dancing to a Whig beat, but Plumb played a Country tune.

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 11th July 1982

Moreana ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (Number 157- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
John McConica
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
International Commission ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

During the period in which these papers were given, there were great achievements on the ecumenical scene, as the quest to restore the Church’s unity was pursued enthusiastically by all the major Christiandenominations. The Papal visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 witnessed a warmth in relationships between the Church of England and the Catholic Church that had not been experienced since the early 16th century Reformation in England to which More fell victim. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was achieving considerable doctrinal consensus and revisionist scholarship was encouraging an historical review by which the faithful Catholic and the confessing Protestant could look upon each other respectfully and appreciatively. It is to this ecumenical theme that James McConica turns in his contribution.

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