Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA)

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The Theology of Toleration: A Reading of Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity

October 20, 1997 | Richard Sherlock

This study offers a new, more political, view of the intentions, structure, and meaning of Locke's masterpiece The Reasonableness of Christianity. It argues that Locke's work is not to be viewed as another in a long line of seventeenth century works purporting to offer a "rational" basis for the Christian religion. Rather Locke's purpose is to reinterpret Christian doctrine in order to make it "safe" for liberal regimes. Locke's Jesus is not the Divine mediator nor focus of God's revelation to humankind. Rather he is a moral teacher who provides the religious imprimatur for the virtuous behavior of the masses that liberalism requires.

On the Unity of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Paul Bagley

April 25, 1995

The Histories and Successes of the Hebrews: The Demise of the Biblical Polity in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise

April 25, 1995

Here it happens that human beings in their Chronicles and histories narrate their own opinions rather than the very things enacted, and that one and the same incident is nar rated so differently by two human beings who have different opinions that they seem to be speaking of two incidents, and finally that it is often not very difficult to investigate the opinions of the Chronographers and historians from the histories alone.

The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Harvey Shulman

April 25, 1995

The Idea of the Messiah in the Theology of Thomas Hobbes

October 27, 1992