WorkJohn Locke

The Reasonableness of Christianity

The book that reduced the Christian creed to a single article and got its unnamed author called a Socinian, a denier of Christ's divinity.

by John Locke254 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1695(aged 63)
Original language: English

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Overview

The four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were Locke's evidence, and he put one question to them: what did Jesus and his apostles require a person to believe before they counted him a Christian? His finding, set out in The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695, is that they asked for one belief, that Jesus is the Messiah, together with repentance and an honest attempt to live by his law. The creeds, the catechisms and the systems of the theologians came later, and nobody's salvation depends on them. Locke had written the Essay to mark the limits of reason, and here he explains why reason had not been enough. Philosophers before Christ never assembled a complete morality, he argues, and even if one of them had, a day-labourer or a dairymaid has no time to follow a proof; they need a plain rule from an authority they can trust, and the Gospel supplies it. He also rejects the teaching that Adam's guilt passed to his descendants. What Adam lost, on his reading, was immortality. The book came out unsigned, and it is silent on the Trinity. John Edwards, a Calvinist clergyman from Cambridge, noticed the silence. Within the year he called the author a Socinian, the name then given to those who denied that Christ is God, and tied the book to atheism. Locke answered in a Vindication in 1695 and a second one in 1697, still without his name. The Blasphemy Act of 1697 made denial of the Trinity a criminal offence. Locke never stated his own position in public. The plain creed he had argued for set the tone of much English theology in the century that followed.

Key concepts

What is the difference between the law of works and the law of faith?

The law of works demands perfect obedience: whoever breaks it once is no longer righteous and falls under its penalty, which is death. The law of faith keeps the same moral rule and changes the terms. Those who believe in the Messiah and sincerely try to obey have their belief counted in place of the complete obedience they could not give. Locke takes both names from Paul.

What does “Messiah” mean in Locke’s reading?

Messiah means the anointed one: the king and deliverer whom the Jewish scriptures promised and whom Jesus’ hearers were expecting. Locke argues that “Son of God” was, at that time, another title for the same figure. To believe that Jesus is the Messiah is therefore to accept him as the promised king, and with that to accept his law as binding.

What does Locke mean by justification?

Justification is being counted righteous before God, and so being given eternal life. By strict justice only someone who had never sinned would qualify. Locke’s account is that God, by grace, counts the faith of those who accept the Messiah as making up for the failures in their obedience. Faith does not replace the effort to live well; it covers the shortfall of an honest effort.

What is repentance, for Locke?

Repentance is more than regret. Locke defines it as sorrow for past wrongdoing together with what follows if the sorrow is real: turning away from it and beginning a new and contrary life. He treats it as the second condition of salvation alongside faith. Jesus and John the Baptist, he points out, both opened their preaching with the same demand to repent.

How does the law of nature relate to the Gospel?

The law of nature is the moral law that reason can in principle discover, and Locke holds that the Gospel’s commands are the same law. The difference is in how it reaches people. Reason finds it slowly, in pieces, and with no power to bind. In the Gospel it comes whole, stated plainly, from a lawgiver whose authority his miracles and resurrection attest.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One Article of Faith

What must a person believe to be a Christian? Locke goes to the preaching of Jesus and the apostles for the answer and comes back with a single sentence, joined to a life that tries to match it.

Locke reads the Gospels and Acts as a record of what was actually demanded of converts, and finds one proposition: that Jesus is the Messiah. With it go repentance and a sincere effort to obey his law. He frames this through two laws. The law of works requires perfect obedience and condemns everyone, since no one manages it; the law of faith counts belief for righteousness where obedience falls short. Adam’s fall, on this reading, cost mankind immortality and not innocence, and nobody is punished for another’s sin. The apostles’ letters add nothing to the creed, because they were written to people who were Christians already.

faith
messiahship
salvation
belief
justification
repentance
obedience
messiah
christology
apostolic preaching
eternal life
messianic identity

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Why Reason Was Not Enough

If reason can discover the moral law, what did the world need a revelation for? Locke answers as the author of the Essay: reason could have done the work and, as a matter of history, did not.

Before Christ, Locke argues, the philosophers had fragments of morality and no complete body of it, and what they had carried no authority: a rule was one sage’s opinion. The priests, who did have authority, taught ceremonies and not virtue. Even a perfect demonstration of ethics would have been useless to most people, who have no leisure to follow long proofs. The day-labourer and the dairymaid need a plain rule from someone they have reason to trust. The Gospel supplied one lawgiver, clear commands and the promise of a life to come, which gave virtue the dowry it had lacked.

revelation
reason
natural law
moral law
religious authority
scripture
righteousness

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Within this work

passages held: 254
distinct concepts: 279
by passages held, corpus-wide: #294

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “faith” and “salvation”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
faith	salvation	20
messiahship	scriptural interpretation	14
messiahship	miracles	13
faith	messiah	11
messiahship	political authority	11
faith	messiahship	8
faith	messianism	7
political authority	scriptural interpretation	7
messianism	political authority	6
messiah	miracles	4
messianism	miracles	4
messianism	salvation	4
miracles	political authority	4
faith	miracles	3
faith	scriptural interpretation	3
messiah	salvation	2
messiah	scriptural interpretation	2
miracles	scriptural interpretation	2
messiahship	salvation	1
miracles	salvation	1
salvation	scriptural interpretation	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration (Epistola de Tolerantia)
The one statement of his case for religious freedom that Locke made briefly and to a friend. Everything else he printed on the subject defends this text against one of its critics, Jonas Proast.
EN
1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The book Locke's reputation rests on, and the one major work of 1689 that he signed. His quarrel with Bishop Stillingfleet, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding and the letters to William Molyneux all grow out of it.
EN
1689 Two Treatises of Government
Two parts of a longer manuscript whose middle was lost before printing, as Locke's preface says. The book is his political theory, and it shares a year and a purpose with A Letter Concerning Toleration: each sets a limit on what a ruler may do.
EN
1690 Further Letters Concerning Toleration
A sequel in three parts to A Letter Concerning Toleration: Locke's second and third letters and the fragment of a fourth, each a reply to the Oxford chaplain Jonas Proast. The third is where he tests his case hardest.
EN
1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Written for the household of his friend Edward Clarke and enlarged by Locke through several editions. It is his book of practical advice on raising a child, and it applies the Essay's view that the mind is formed by what it meets.
EN
1695 The Reasonableness of Christianity you are here EN
1696 Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade
Advice written for ministers and for Parliament during the currency crisis of the 1690s, and gathered under Locke's name in 1696. The account of money behind it is sketched in the chapter on property in the Two Treatises.
EN
1697 Letters to the Bishop of Worcester
Locke's own commentary on the Essay, written under attack: three replies to Edward Stillingfleet, issued as separate pamphlets between 1697 and 1699, with a short answer to a second critic, Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse.
EN
1706 Of the Conduct of the Understanding
An unfinished draft, printed from Locke's papers two years after his death. It is the practical companion to the Essay and overlaps with his advice on education.
EN
1706 Posthumous Works
From the volume of unpublished papers that Locke's executors issued in 1706: a critique of Malebranche from the 1690s and a short discourse on miracles from 1702. Both extend arguments begun in the Essay.
EN
1708 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends
Letters to the Molyneux brothers of Dublin — Locke's side of the correspondence — taken from a volume his publishers issued in 1708. It is the closest view of him at work on the later editions of the Essay.
EN
1720 A Collection of Several Pieces
The Carolina constitution of 1669 predates the Two Treatises by ten years or more, and the two are often set against each other. Pierre Des Maizeaux published it in 1720 together with shorter pieces left out of the collected works.
EN

— or open another of their works