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Author: Timothy Fuller

Timothy Fuller is Dean of the College and Professor of Political Science at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He specializes in British Political thought.
The Idea of Christianity in Hobbes’s Leviathan

The Idea of Christianity in Hobbes’s Leviathan

October 27, 1992 | Timothy Fuller
This essay expounds Hobbes's idea of Christianity based on a reading of Leviathan as a whole. Among the conclusions are these: First, that Hobbes was profoundly concerned with the religious questions spawned by the Reformation from start to finish in Leviathan, and there provides his most extended, elaborate commentary on Christian belief. The common neglect of the third and fourth parts of Leviathan is a mistake, not only because Hobbes himself believed them of fundamental importance to his theorizing of the conditions for civil peace and spiritual repose, but be cause the themes of the latter two parts are present in the first two parts persistently.