Theopedia

John Locke

It seems to me plainly to prove, that the truest and best notions men have of God were not imprinted, but acquired by thought and meditation, and a right use of their faculties.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1.4.15 (1690)1

John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher whose theory of knowledge, developed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), argued that the mind holds no innate ideas and that all knowledge arises from sensation and reflection.2 Herman Bavinck classes Locke among the empiricists who, against the older doctrine of innate ideas, held that “all knowledge stems from sense perception,”3 and elsewhere groups him with the deists who mounted a “frontal attack on revelation,” citing Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) as work that “assigned to reason the decision concerning revelation.”4 Locke’s own writing on the Trinity and on biblical interpretation drew direct theological engagement and criticism, both from a contemporary Anglican bishop and from later Reformed theologians.

Theological Contribution

Epistemology and the limits of revelation

Locke rejected the doctrine of innate ideas, comparing the mind at birth to a blank slate, and held that ideas of God, of spirit, and of moral and religious truth are acquired the same way as any other idea: through sensation or reflection on sensation, not through an intuitive faculty built into the mind.2 Charles Hodge, reading Locke directly, credited him with two distinguishable claims often run together by his followers: first, that experience is the occasion on which the mind comes to grasp a truth; second, the stronger claim that experience is the source of that truth. Hodge judged that Locke’s own text does not clearly distinguish the two, and that many who came after him took the stronger claim, using it to press ideas of causation, right and wrong, and God back to nothing more than accumulated sense experience.5 Locke himself, Hodge noted, was “far from being a Materialist,” and his own defenders “strenuously insist that his principles have no legitimate tendency to obliterate the distinction between matter and mind” - it was the use later writers made of his epistemology, not a materialism Locke taught outright, that produced that result.2

The same epistemology reordered the relationship between reason and revelation. Godet’s account of Locke’s Essay summarizes its two lasting effects on English thought: it displaced innate ideas with an empirical account of knowledge, and it displaced the traditional authority of revelation with the authority of reason to judge whether a claimed revelation is genuine.6 Bavinck’s Reasonableness of Christianity citation makes the same point from the reception side: Locke did not deny revelation outright, as the deists after him would, but made reason the judge before which any claimed revelation had to answer.4

The Trinity controversy with Stillingfleet

Locke’s epistemology drew him into direct controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity. Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, warned in his 1697 Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity that Locke’s “way of ideas” endangered the doctrine: if all human knowledge is built from simple ideas received through sensation or reflection, Stillingfleet argued, there is no way to form a notion of any substance, including a spiritual one, since no substance as such is ever sensed directly.7 Godet is careful to note that Locke had not intended his theory of knowledge to be applied to theology the way John Toland had done in Christianity Not Mysterious - Stillingfleet’s charge was that Locke’s philosophy could be turned against the Trinity, not that Locke had denied it himself.7

Locke defended himself at length. He answered Stillingfleet with a 227-page letter in January 1697; Stillingfleet replied in April; Locke answered again, prompting a further reply from Stillingfleet, after which the bishop dropped the dispute; Locke then published a 452-page final reply of his own.8 The exchange ran through three full rounds of published letters before it ended.

A theory of election in Locke’s biblical commentary

Locke also wrote directly on Scripture, in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul. James Petigru Boyce, opening his chapter on election in Abstract of Systematic Theology, takes Locke’s reading as the first theory he addresses, quoting its substance:

[Election consists] in the choice of certain whole nations into the pale of the visible Church Catholic, which choice, however, relates purely to their privileged condition in this world extending not to their collective eternal state in another world. [The cause of this election is] that same absolute good pleasure of God, which, through the exercise of his sovereign power, led him to choose the posterity of Jacob, rather than that of Esau, that, upon earth, they should become his peculiar people and be made the depositaries and preservers of the true religion.9

Boyce raised several objections from the text of Romans: that Paul’s own language distinguishes a remnant “according to the election of grace” from the nation as a whole (Rom. 11:5-7), that Christ speaks of individuals being deceived or preserved as “the very elect” amid a nation under judgment (Matt. 24:22-24), and that “called” and “chosen” are not the same class of persons (Matt. 22:14).10 On Boyce’s reading, Locke’s attempt to limit “Israel” in Romans 11 to the pre-exilic nation, distinct from the “remnant” of Paul’s own day, does not survive Paul’s own use of “Israel” for his contemporaries in Romans 10:21.10

Historical Significance

Locke’s philosophy became, in Hodge’s judgment, the channel through which Materialism entered English thought in the eighteenth century, even though Locke himself was not a materialist.2 Bavinck places him at the head of a line of English deist and rationalist writers - John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, and eventually David Hume - who each pressed the priority of reason over revelation further than Locke himself had done, ending in the skepticism Hume brought to natural religion.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: In Four Books (London: Tho. Basset, 1690), 1.4.15, quoted in Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 33. ↩

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 248. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

  4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:249. ↩

  6. Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” 33-34. ↩

  7. Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill,” 103. ↩ ↩2

  8. Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” 104-105. ↩

  9. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXIX. Election,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 341, quoting George Stanley Faber, The Primitive Doctrine of Election, 22. ↩

  10. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 341-342. ↩ ↩2